Economic method and economic rhetoric

John Maloney

Journal of Economic Methodology, 1994, vol. 1, issue 2, 253-268

Abstract: McCloskey's work on the rhetoric of economics has little to say about Imre Lakatos, and indeed the scientific method prescribed by Lakatos, as it stands, would support McCloskey's claim that philosophers' imperatives bear little relation to what economists actually do. But a Bayesianized version of Lakatos is a different matter, and provides a yardstick against which the various rhetorical devices noted by McCloskey can be measured. We argue that McCloskey's list can be divided into those forms of persuasion which would and would not remain convincing once the reader saw how the persuasion was being worked, and that this distinction corresponds precisely to those forms of persuasion which do and do not represent the 'Bayesianized Lakatos' method.

Date: 1994
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13501789400000020 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jecmet:v:1:y:1994:i:2:p:253-268

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJEC20

DOI: 10.1080/13501789400000020

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Methodology is currently edited by John Davis and D Wade Hands

More articles in Journal of Economic Methodology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().