Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I Exordium
- Part II Narration
- Part III Division
- Part IV Proof
- Part V Refutation
- 14 The very idea of epistemology
- 15 The tu quoque argument and the claims of rationalism
- 16 Armchair philosophy of economics
- 17 Philosophy of science without epistemology: the Popperians
- 18 Reactionary modernism: the Rosenberg
- 19 Methodologists of economics, big M and small
- 20 Getting “rhetoric”: Mark Blaug and the Eleatic Stranger
- 21 Anti-post-pre-metamodernism: the Coats/McPherson/Friedman
- 22 Splenetic rationalism, Austrian style
- 23 The economists of ideology: Heilbroner, Rossetti, and Mirowski
- 24 Rhetoric as morally radical
- Part VI Peroration
- List of works cited
- Index
14 - The very idea of epistemology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part I Exordium
- Part II Narration
- Part III Division
- Part IV Proof
- Part V Refutation
- 14 The very idea of epistemology
- 15 The tu quoque argument and the claims of rationalism
- 16 Armchair philosophy of economics
- 17 Philosophy of science without epistemology: the Popperians
- 18 Reactionary modernism: the Rosenberg
- 19 Methodologists of economics, big M and small
- 20 Getting “rhetoric”: Mark Blaug and the Eleatic Stranger
- 21 Anti-post-pre-metamodernism: the Coats/McPherson/Friedman
- 22 Splenetic rationalism, Austrian style
- 23 The economists of ideology: Heilbroner, Rossetti, and Mirowski
- 24 Rhetoric as morally radical
- Part VI Peroration
- List of works cited
- Index
Summary
“The last decade,” Roger Backhouse noted grimly in 1992, “has seen an explosion of interest in the rhetoric of economics” (Backhouse 1992b, p. 65). I am asked sometimes how the reaction has been to the rhetorical turn. Occasionally I get news secondhand of apoplexy, often bearing signs that the sufferer has not read what he is apoplectic about. “Klamer, McCloskey, and the rest want economics to become rhetorical.” (It already is.) “They think that economics is merely rhetoric, and not a Science.” (No, rhetoric is not mere; and science is rhetorical; economics is such a science.) “I see absolutely nothing in what I have read of the rhetoric literature, that affects my practice in any way.” (Uh, huh. Those who have missed the point often show it in the solecism of “the rhetoric literature”). As it was put once by the churchman and rhetorician Richard Whately (Elements of Rhetoric, 1828 and seven editions down to 1847), “I have ascertained that a very large proportion of those who join in the outcry against my works, confess, or even boast, that they have never read them” (1834, p. 284).
But in a bulky correspondence no one has actually written to me in this way (one man stormed out of a seminar I was giving on the utter uselessness of statistical significance, but that's about it for apoplexy openly expressed).
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- Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics , pp. 181 - 198Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994