| My dissertation examines Deirdre McCloskey's rhetorical work in a manner consistent with her call for rhetorically aware economic criticism. My goals are: First, to situate and clarify the linguistic, literary, and philosophical approaches introduced by McCloskey. Second, to present and criticize the language-theories she adopts, and to develop several modifications and extensions. Third, to criticize and evaluate her contribution and its consequences.; I proceed with a close reading of McCloskey's major texts and secondary literature, focusing on the language as endogenous to the scientific endeavor at all levels of inquiry. I use Jacques Derrida's deconstruction to study the structure of language, and to provide an approach for looking at the functioning of scientific language within a complex social context governed by the historical institutions with which it is interdependent. I study the institutions in which economic knowledge is produced and their epistemological history in a manner inspired by the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault and Derrida have had a tremendous impact on the humanities and the social sciences but their works have scarcely been explicitly introduced and studied within the context of our field.; I look at the philosophical foundations of the problem of language in science in general in order to understand the fundamental difficulties that underlie the ongoing debate that followed the rhetorical project in economics. For this purpose Uskali Mäki's influential analytical critique of McCloskey is particularly helpful. Epistemological foundations are behind the metatheoretical schism between analytical and postmodern philosophy. Using the insights of Derridian deconstruction and Foucauldian political sociology to adjust scientific epistemology allows me to argue that analytical and postmodern philosophy are not only compatible but indeed complementary. Furthermore, I argue that only through a thorough understanding of the essential tensions between the two approaches could one claim to have explained social phenomena to a satisfactory degree of scientific completeness.; I outline a structural view of ethics which provides a systematic way of addressing the irreducible duplicities raised by the study of the rhetoric of science, and suspect that the current crisis in scientific objectivity can be better understood as an ethical discourse. |
