Scholastic Rhetoric as a Method of Producing Texts in the Community of Theoretical Economists

Abstract

Although new ideas in science are developed by individuals, science is a collective activity. Scientists constantly communicate with each other. And this communication is an important part of their scientific activities. In natural science, researchers communicate about their contacts with objects of their research, contacts that take the form of experiments in natural sciences. One of the founders of the original American institutionalism, John Commons, discussed with his colleagues and students the facts, the source of which were contacts with the actors of the studied economic activity, contacts that were a functional analog of experiments in natural science. Since regularities in the social sphere arise from the fact that actors follow certain rules in their behaviour, the identification of these rules here is equivalent to the identification of regularities, which the contacts of researchers with actors targeted. This research tradition, which had been actively practiced in the United States between the two World Wars, was suppressed there during the time of McCarthyism. The old tradition of economics, which arose in universities as a continuation and replacement of moral philosophy, closely related to theology, was restored, strengthened, and technically (mathematically) improved.Within this tradition, communication between scientists is not about contacts between them and objects of their research, or about contacts made and described by someone else, but about abstract theoretical constructions. This allowed economists reflecting about their profession, such as Deirdre McCloskey and Arjo Klamer, to argue that economics is nothing more than a conversation or rhetoric. Continuing this thought, I argue that in the absence of information for theoretical economists about contacts with their research objects, communication between them (conversation), which in particular takes the form of published articles, inevitably ends up as scholastic rhetoric. The article by N. A. Shapiro, which is under our scrutiny here, revealed this method of producing texts.