Quotes from The Rhetoric of Economics

By Dierdre McCloskey (1985)

• Precision means low variance of estimation . . . but if the estimate is greatly biased, it will tell precisely nothing.#
  Epistemology
• Talk against talk is self-refuting. The person making it appeals to a social, nonepistemological standard of persuasiveness by the very act of trying to persuade someone that mere persuasion is not enough.#
• Something is awry with an appeal for an open intellectual society, an appeal defending itself on liberal grounds, that begins by demarcating certain ways of reasoning as forbidden and certain fields of study as meaningless.#
  ScienceEpistemology
• It is a cliché among philosophers and historians of science that one of the most successful of all scientific theories, the theory of evolution, makes no predictions and is therefore unfalsifiable by prediction. With fruit flies and bacteria, to be sure, you can test the theory in the approved manner; but its main facts, its dinosaurs and multicolored birds, are things to be explained, not predicted.#
  ScienceEpistemology
• At the level of broad scientific law, scientists simply use their theories. They seldom try to falsify them.#
  MethodologyScience
• Much of economics turns on quarrels of characterization. Is America monopolistic? Were medieval peasants selfish? Is the market for goods worldwide? Is capitalism stable? These are quantitative questions, all depending on answers to the question, “How large is large?”#
  EconomicsMethodology
• Rhetoric is an economics of language, the study of how scarce means are allocated to the insatiable desires of people to be heard.#
  Rhetoric
• The opportunity cost of enchanting one’s fellow economists is alienating noneconomists. There is no such thing as a free argument.#
  Rhetoric
• Flexibility is frequently praised in scientific theories and of course should be. But flexibility is simply a promise that the theory will be able to evade crucial tests, surviving unscathed from positivist tortures. Nothing could be further from naïve falsification.#
  ScienceMethodology
• Unexamined metaphor is a substitute for thinking—which is a recommendation to examine the metaphors, not to attempt the impossible by banishing them.#
  RhetoricEpistemology
• The notion that ideas and their words are invariant lumps unaltered by combination, like bricks, is analogous to believing that an economy is a mere aggregation of Robinson Crusoes.#
  Linguistics
• If a 5 percent tax on gasoline is said by some congressman or journalist to be “designed” to fall entirely on producers the economist will complain, saying “It’s not an equilibrium.” “Not an equilibrium” is the economist’s way of saying that she disputes the ending proposed by some untutored person.#
  EconomicsEquilibrium
• Economics is unsuccessful as social weather forecasting, a role forced on it by the rhetoric of politics and journalism. But it is strikingly successful as social history.#
  EconomicsMethodology

Walker Gibson, “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers” (1950)

• A bad book is a book in whose mock reader we discover a person we refuse to become, a mask we refuse to put on, a role we will not play.#
  Rhetoric

Aristotle, Rhetoric (350 B.C.)

• If it be objected that one who uses such power of speech unjustly might do great harm, that is a charge which may be made in common against all good things except virtue, and above all against the things that are most useful.#
  Rhetoric

Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977)

• The scientist often seems rather to be struggling with facts, trying to force them in conformity with a theory he does not doubt.#
  EpistemologyMethodologyScience

Armand Borel, “Mathematics: Art and Science” (1983)

• Something becomes objective . . . as soon as we are persuaded that it exists in the minds of others in the same form that it does in ours, and that we can think about it and discuss it together.#
  Epistemology

Chaim Perelman, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (1958)

• The acceptance of an analogy . . . is often equivalent to a judgment as to the importance of the characteristics that the analogy brings to the fore.#
  Rhetoric

C.S. Lewis, Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)

• The meaning in any given composition is in inverse ratio to the author’s belief in his own literalness.#
  RhetoricEpistemology

F.Y. Edgeworth, “The Value of Authority Tested by Experiment” (1888)

• All that authority can do is—what, according to Horace, all that philosophy can do—to get rid of a large portion of error.#
  Epistemology