Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics
Cambridge University Press, 5/5/1994
EAN 9780521434751, ISBN10: 0521434750
Hardcover, 464 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 3 cm
Language: English
Is economics a science? Deidre McCloskey says 'Yes, but'. Yes, economics measures and predicts, but - like other sciences - it uses literary methods too. Economists use stories as geologists do, and metaphors as physicists do. The result is that the sciences, economics among them, must be read as 'rhetoric', in the sense of writing with intent. McCloskey's books, The Rhetoric of Economics(1985) and If You're So Smart(1990), have been widely discussed. In Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics he converses with his critics, suggesting that they too can gain from knowing their rhetoric. The humanistic and mathematical approaches to economics, says McCloskey, fit together in a new 'interpretive' economics. Along the way he places economics within the sciences, examines the role of mathematics in the field, replies to critics from the left, right and centre, and shows how economics can again take a leading place in the conversation of humankind.
Part I. Exordium
1. A positivist youth
2. Kicking the dead horse
Part II. Narration
3. Economics in the human conversation
4. The rhetoric of economics
Part III. Division
5. The Science word in economics
6. Three ways of reading economics to criticize itself
7. Popper and Lakatos
thin ways of reading economics
8. Thick readings
ethics, economics, sociology and rhetoric
Part IV. Proof
9. The rise of a scientistic style
10. The rhetoric of mathematical formalism
existence theorems
11. General equilibrium and the rhetorical history of formalism
12. Blackboard Marxism
13. Formalists as poets and politicians
Part V. Refutation
14. The very idea of epistemology
15. The tu quoque argument and the claims of rationalism
16. Armchair philosophy of economics
Rosenberg and Hausman
17. Philosophy of science without epistemology
the Popperians
18. The Rosenberg
reactionary modernism
19. Methodologists of economics, big-M and small
20. Getting 'rhetoric'
Mark Blaug and the Eleatic Stranger
21. Coats/McPherson/Friedman
anti-meta-post-modernism
22. Splenetic rationalism, Austrian style
23. The economists of ideology
Heilbroner, Rossetti, and Mirowski
24. Rhetoric as morally radical
Part VI. Peroration
25. The economy as a conversation
26. The consequences of rhetoric.