ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Economic controversies from a pragma-rhetoric point of view
Author: Cremaschi Sergio
This paper draws on previous work on one controversy among economists, namely the one between Malthus and Ricardo, in order to extract from it a methodological lesson to be applied possibly to other economic controversies. The main claim is that the study of controversies, as a kind of rational practice carried out in an inter-subjective framework, is able to offer a privileged ground for the construction of a bridge between both approaches; in the same time the study of controversies may offer a way out of familiar conundrums of philosophy of science, namely an alternative view of the activity of criticism and of its bearing on the growth of knowledge. First, I illustrate what Gricean pragmatics is, and why something analogous to Grice’s logic of conversation — namely, a set of rules seems for conducting the controversy that are both the result of spontaneous order and endowed with normative validity — to arise out of the exchange between opponents. Secondly, I examine the rhetorical dimension in controversies and try to show how rhetoric is important and how it does not consist exclusively in techniques of communication aimed at producing persuasion, but instead how basic items from the rhetoric repertoire, such as metaphor and style, do have cognitive content and are compatible with rational argument. Thirdly, I enounce a lesson that may be drawn from case studies. Controversies seldom yield persuasion, and yet its "benefit" seems to be clarification of contrasting approaches to the discipline. Fourthly, I try to suggest a general consideration about the inbuilt rationality of controversies. I argue that the rationality of controversies may be accounted for at best by a pragma-rhetoric approach, that is, by studying patterns of both co-operative communication and persuasive use of discourse. What emerges is something less rationalist than any kind of Methodology and yet much more rational than Rhetoric-cum-Constructivism.
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