Presentation On Mccloskey, Hetoric Of Economics, Economic Arguments

Presentation on McCloskey
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Presentation of McCloskey
Ladies and gentlemen, I want to take a few moments to tell you about the rhetoric of economics. I am certain you are all concerned about the controversies entailed in economic arguments. It is a good thing that economists never follow inquiry laws laid down by their methodologies for if they did, they would never tell us matters that they commonly speak of such as laws of demand. The grounds on which economists argue are wide. But it is important that they be “self-conscious about their rhetoric” because they must have facts about why they do agree or disagree. By rhetoric, I mean questioning what people think they should believe and not proving what is considered to be true according to abstract methodologies. That is just one of the accepted definitions of rhetoric-there are more ways of defining it. It is not expected that economics will change a lot in substance but arguments among economists would improve a lot if they have solid grounds for their arguments. Economists make claims to be arguing “grounds of positive economics”, “limited matters of statistical inference”, behaviorism, and operationalism. They believe that the above are the only grounds on which science should be discussed. There is therefore the need to critically examine the “rhetoric of economics”. There is need to discuss economic arguments in a mutual discussion. Economists therefore need to work today to arrive at their arguments.
Economists subscribe to “official and unofficial, explicit and implicit” rhetoric. The official rhetoric that economists subscribe to makes them modern day scientists. Therefore, just like other people in the rhetorical community, they have a duty to produce conviction. They subscribe to “modernism” as their official methodology. A common notion of modernism is that “we know only what we cannot doubt and cannot really know what we can merely assent to.” But modernism is not a good method. Even in philosophy, it is dead. The first problem is that economists rely on falsification to base their scientific reasoning and yet it is not convincing according to decades of study by philosophers. Additionally, it is never easy to make predictions in economics. Many philosophers and researchers believe that no mortal human being can predict the future of economics. Moreov...