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Why Economics Needs Rhetoric University of Windsor Scholarship at UWindsor OSSA Conference Archive OSSA 10 May 22nd, 9:00 AM - May 25th, 5:00 PM The failure of certainty: Why economics needs rhetoric Jerry Petersen Utah Valley University, Department of English Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ossaarchive Part of the Philosophy Commons Petersen, Jerry, "The failure of certainty: Why economics needs rhetoric" (2013). OSSA Conference Archive. 132. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ossaarchive/OSSA10/papersandcommentaries/132 This Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Conferences and Conference Proceedings at Scholarship at UWindsor. It has been accepted for inclusion in OSSA Conference Archive by an authorized conference organizer of Scholarship at UWindsor. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The failure of certainty: Why economics needs rhetoric JERRY PETERSEN Department of English Utah Valley University Orem, UT, 84058 USA [email protected] ABSTRACT: Privileging deductive first principles over inductive contingencies, I argue, contributed to the economic meltdown of late and will continue to limit the range of reasonable solutions available to solve entrenched economic problems. I cite Toulmin’s critique of scientific certainty and the rancor over the demise of the ninth planet Pluto to posit a role for rhetoric in making valid claims across all fields of study, calling for more productive uncertainty subject to vigorous argumentation. KEYWORDS: Adam Smith, deduction, economics, financial crisis, induction, philosophy, political economy, rhetoric, scientific method 1. INTRODUCTION The last forty years of American economic policy, according to former longtime head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, marked an experiment to test the assumed efficacy of persons acting in their self-interest for the benefit of all. In response to questions from a US Congressional committee seeking information about the causes of the financial collapse of 2008, Greenspan conceded, I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in their firms (Corn, 2008). The disastrous results of such presumptive certainty spread around the globe, pointing to errors in the model. Modern mainstream economists, at least by Greenspan’s own account, created the conditions for an economic collapse fostered by a mistaken characterization of Adam Smith’s ideas—highlighting the presumed sanctity of self-interested behavior and the widespread benefits of the “invisible hand.” What is hardly mentioned by strident free market purists and advocates of deregulation is that Smith balanced notions of an open marketplace with social and civic responsibility, armed as he was with a profound appreciation of human behavior and knowledge of rhetoric. I cite Smith’s overtly rhetorical and less dogmatic approach in his Wealth of Nations to contrast this with the deductive leap taken by political economists in his wake; yet, it was the same Smith who admired the use of first principles as a professor of rhetoric and advocated it to his students. Under the banner of the didactic method, Smith advised in lectures: Mohammed, D., & Lewiński, M. (Eds.). Virtues of Argumentation. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA), 22-26 May 2013. Windsor, ON: OSSA, pp. 1-15. JERRY PETERSEN [I]n the manner of Sir Isaac Newton, we may lay down certain principles, primary or proved, in the beginning, from whence we account for the several phenomena, connecting all together by the same chain . It gives us pleasure to see the phenomena which we reckoned the most unaccountable, all deduced from some principle . (Smith, 1971, p. 140) Newton’s manner, as Smith calls it, became what Stephen Toulmin calls “the physics that never was” (2001, p. 55), and found adherents for its ability to predict in a stable universe, with little need to debate infallible first principles. In this essay, I trace the path and consequences of emulating the methods of Newton in pursuit of certainty in the field of economics. Before tracing the historical developments that contributed to the transformation of the (mainly) inductive philosophy of early political economy to the (mainly) deductive science of latter-day economics, I want to briefly foreground Smith’s ambivalent relationship with deduction and induction in his own writings with the help of one of Plato’s most insightful dialogues on the conflict between rhetoric and dialectic: Protagoras. Plato’s Protagoras provides a dramatic demonstration of the age-old split between rhetoric and philosophy and disputes over methods so central to the transformation of political economy to the science of economics. Socrates pays a visit to the famous sophist (and namesake of the dialogue) to find out why he thinks virtue can be taught. Protagoras, an eloquent speaker in love with the sound of his own voice, draws upon historical, cultural, and social themes to defend his position that, indeed, virtue is teachable. Meanwhile, Socrates is impatient with Protagoras’ voluminous yet spellbinding speech, and he insists on short answers to brief questions to move the dialectical contest forward to the truth (and, of course, secure a victory) (Plato, 1989, 334e-325). In the end, the debate disintegrates into a puerile pouting-match between the foes, and, for Plato, a demonstration of the hubris of human beings and corresponding pitfalls of using contrastive methods in pursuing truth. To illustrate my analogy, Socrates plays the deductive/abstract philosopher (qua-scientist) and Protagoras the inductive/historical sophist (qua-rhetorician). Moving back to Smith, I see him as a bit of both Protagoras and Socrates: inductive rhetorician and deductive philosopher. Smith “recognized the patent contradiction between reality on the ground and conclusions drawn solely from deduction” (Kennedy, 2008, p. 137), and so Smith’s “methodology was eclectic,” with a blend of the “empirical, the theoretical, the institutional, the philosophical, the static, and the dynamic . all intermingled” (Sowell, as cited in Milonakis & Fine, 2009, p. 16). In short, he applied deductive and inductive methods, and for the rest of economic history to the present, the two sides of Smith, like the estranged children of Abraham, began their own antagonistic methodological economic traditions. Irish historical economist, Cliffe Leslie, first noted this in 1870, pointing to the “dualism” in Smith that split into two distinct schools with opposite methods: “[o]ne of them is represented by [David] Ricardo as the founder of the deductive method; the other of which [Robert] Malthus and [John Stuart] Mill are the chief representatives, combines a priori and inductive methods” (Milonakis & Fine, 2009, p. 18). Although Smith “employed deductive reasoning,” it was “not of an axiomatic nature,” and as “a keen observer . of history and different societies” he “frequently used facts to 2 JERRY PETERSEN illustrate arguments. In short, his deductions were usually empirically founded” (John Phedy, as cited in Milonakis & Fine, 2009, p. 18). Smith may have lectured admiringly about Newton’s method, nevertheless, his Wealth of Nations reasons from inductive to deductive proofs. It wasn’t until 1870 when economics, as a newly emerging social science, began to take on in earnest earlier attempts to emulate Newton’s physics. In his lectures, years before he wrote the Wealth of Nations, Smith discerns two distinct methods in didactic, or instructional, writing; one associated with Aristotle and the other with Newton: [I]n Natural Philosophy, or any other science of that sort, we may either, like Aristotle, go over the different branches in the order they happen to [be] cast up to us, giving a principle, commonly a new one, for every phenomenon; or, in the manner of Sir Isaac Newton, we may lay down certain principles, primary, or proved, in the beginning, for whence we account for the several phenomena, connecting all together by the same chain. This latter, which we may call the Newtonian method, is undoubtedly the most philosophical, and in every science, whether of Morals or Natural Philosophy, etc., is vastly more ingenious, and for that reason more engaging, than the other. (Smith, 1971, p. 140) Sharing Smith’s glowing appraisal of Newton’s method was a new professional class of experts in the various emerging studies that would become the social sciences. Smith scholar Pierre Force ponders Smith’s contrastive methods in his two famous works, giving some understanding of the rhetorical method of inquiry and role of primary and subordinate propositions in both. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Force notes, “operates in more geometrico,” advancing a first principle (sympathy) followed by the consequences of those principles (2003, p. 127). By contrast, in the Wealth, Force adds, Smith employs an analytic strategy, beginning with a problem “(what are the causes of the wealth of nations?), and he gradually analyzes the problem, by identifying explanatory principles that are more and more general” (2003, p. 127). The attraction of this strategy to Smith in the Wealth seems to be that it allows an unfolding of general principles grounded in moral precepts drawn from actual examples of human behavior. In this light, one can view Smith as a rhetorician and moral philosopher who applied his methods to the problems of political economy. In an attempt to gain the status of a pure science in a Newtonian sense, the philosophy of political economy, etched with historical, social, and ethical concerns had to be jettisoned and left to re-organize as separate fields of study. Recalling Plato’s dramatic dialogue in Protagoras, wherein Socrates’ concept of virtue as an individual’s choice for pleasure over pain (1989, 357a-b) (the proto-utility maximizing self-contained unit) is pitted against Protagoras’ concept of a pluralistic participatory virtue hashed out in the public forum (1989, pp.
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