Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics.

• Author: Yoon, Yong J.

Since his 1983 article in the Journal of Economic Literature, McCloskey has lead for more than a decade the discussion of "the rhetoric of economics, "the question of how better to argue in economics. Rhetoric is not, as should be clear to all, merely appealing talk separate from the substance. Rhetoric matters because it is concerned with what should pass as knowledge and truth in science. Persuasive discussion uses fact, logic, metaphor, storytelling, and authority.

McCloskey's book is well written and covers a remarkable breadth of methodology in economic science, which will not fail to stir the economist's interest and protest, though most economists are not familiar with them. It is also provocative, evocative, and most of all entertaining.

The book begins with McCloskey's literary critique, an intellectual autobiography, of methodology and philosophy of economic science. He elaborates on his original motivation for the rhetoric in economics, i.e., criticism of modernism (extreme rationalism) and logical positivism. Alexander Rosenberg, a philosopher of economic science, is discussed extensively. Rosenberg charges that economic theory is nothing but applied mathematics. McCloskey argues that this charge applies only to general equilibrium theory and mathematical economics and armchair discussions of philosophers who fail to see the economic science. The book has extensive replies to his critics, mostly from philosophers of economics and the Austrian school. Along with the two earlier books, this book helps our understanding of his ideas from philosophical perspectives. The book ends by emphasizing the omnipresence of the rhetoric, language and conversation.

Inevitably McCloskey's enterprise on meta-economics (about-economics) touches on the whole aspect of doing economics (and reasoning). Mainstream economists preach and pretend to practice the research in economics by developing falsifiable hypothesis and confronting the data. Such methodology (modernism, logical positivism, rationalism, all from Cartesian methodology), as advocated by Milton Friedman, Becker and Stigler, and Lucas (my addition), McCloskey criticizes as being too narrow and misleading the science. It simply is not consistent with the way scientists (economists) actually work and communicate.

His basic insight is that the science involves more than this tight jacket of falsification; more fundamentally, it involves rhetoric, the argument or discourse using facts...