Performance against Dialogue, or Answering and Really Answering: A Participant Observer’s Reflections on the McCloskey Conversation
My career as a friendly critic of Deirdre McCloskey's approach to the rhetoric of economics has been an extremely rewarding experience. I have learned immensely. I have learned about rhetoric, about economics, about McCloskey, about myself-and about the difficulties of scholarly debate. The experience has been rewarding because it has given me the opportunity to develop building blocks for my own preferred understanding of the rhetoric of science and of economics in particular. For this side of the experience, I refer to my other work [see especially Miki 1992, 1993a, 1993b, 1995, 1997]. At the same time, the experience has been somewhat frustrating: I am not convinced that McCloskey and I have been able to generate a fully genuine debate or dialogue that would have consistently met some of the central norms of genuine scholarly conversation. It is some of these frustrations that I want to share with others in what follows. 1 My strategy is the following. I will first make a few conceptual distinctions which can be used to suggest criteria of successful scholarly conversation. I will then explain why I think we failed again to meet those criteria in our recent exchange in the most prominent forum that was generously provided to us, The Journal of Economic Literature. To my "Diagnosing McCloskey," McCloskey replied in terms of a contrast that was presumably intended as devastating: "Modern epistemology against analytic philosophy" [Miki 1995; McCloskey 1995]. My reaction here is to suggest another contrast: a meta-level contrast between dialogue and performance.