Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics Book

Part I. Exordium:

1. A positivist youth;
2. Kicking the dead horse;

Part II. Narration:
3. Economics in the human conversation;
4. The rhetoric of economics;

Part III. Division:
5. The Science word in economics;
6. Three ways of reading economics to criticize itself;
7. Popper and Lakatos: thin ways of reading economics;
8. Thick readings: ethics, economics, sociology and rhetoric;

Part IV. Proof:
9. The rise of a scientistic style;
10. The rhetoric of mathematical formalism: existence theorems;
11. General equilibrium and the rhetorical history of formalism;
12. Blackboard Marxism;
13. Formalists as poets and politicians;

Part V. Refutation:
14. The very idea of epistemology;
15. The tu quoque argument and the claims of rationalism;
16. Armchair philosophy of economics: Rosenberg and Hausman;
17. Philosophy of science without epistemology: the Popperians;
18. The Rosenberg: reactionary modernism;
19. Methodologists of economics, big-M and small;
20. Getting 'rhetoric': Mark Blaug and the Eleatic Stranger;
21. Coats/McPherson/Friedman: anti-meta-post-modernism;
22. Splenetic rationalism, Austrian style;
23. The economists of ideology: Heilbroner, Rossetti, and Mirowski;
24. Rhetoric as morally radical;

Part VI. Peroration:
25. The economy as a conversation;
26. The consequences of rhetoric.