Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics

Argues that economics is a science, but a human science: a witty guide to the ins and outs of economic philosophy.

Deirdre N. McCloskey (Author)

9780521436038, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 5 May 1994

464 pages, 4 tables
22.8 x 15.4 x 3 cm, 0.74 kg

"The book reviewed here is actually the third installment of a trilogy, which began with The Rhetoric of Economics and includes If You're So Smart....To sum up: the views presented in the book are in several aspects richer than McCloskey's earlier views." Pragmatic & Cognition

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.

Subject Areas: Economic theory & philosophy [KCA]