A. W. Coats, an eminent student of economic thought, has properly complained that The Rhetoric of Economics did not deal adequately with economic methodologists now writing (his objections on this count and others were expressed in the Eastern Economic Journal symposium [1987], in a short comment with Bruce Caldwell [1984], and in his paper in the volume edited by Klamer and others in 1988). I have no excuse but exhaustion, from trying to avoid error in too many fields at once. Writing the book required breadth I do not possess, and something had to go; the opportunity cost of other reading was a close study of work by recent economic methodologists, including his own work. It is a failure of energy that I have since had reason to regret, for I could have learned much from the conventional Methodologists, and the oversight has angered them deeply. No scholar is forgiven for not citing another, and I have tried to make amends in this book by responding to every interlocutor, and reading every book. But of course I have failed again.

Coats would agree, however, that economic method in practice does not follow what the most enlightened economic methodologists are presently thinking. My reading of the economic methodologists since finishing the book suggests that they are natural allies of a rhetorical approach.