3 - Economics in the human conversation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2010
Summary
“As civilized human beings,” wrote the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott in 1959, “we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries” (Oakeshott 1959 [1991], p. 490).
In economics in the late 1980s a conversation about the conversation began. It might be interpreted as just carrying on an old conversation about how economists know (if they do), a methodological conversation started a century and a half ago by John Stuart Mill. The new remark in the conversation of economics was simply that economists use arguments beyond syllogism and measurement, a remark being made at about the same time in dozens of other fields from physics to linguistics. The point of making it was not, say, to undercut the math in economics, as non-mathematicians sometimes wish they could. The point was merely to note that all economists, mathematical or not, use analogies, appeals to authority, and other rhetorical devices, using them as thoroughly as poets and preachers, though with less understanding of why. So the recent conversation about conversation can be interpreted as more of the old stuff, an inward and philosophical affair (as in Blaug 1980; Klant 1984; de Marchi and Blaug 1991).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics , pp. 27 - 37Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994