Words, Concepts and Tropes

Abstract

The core notion of rhetoric has remained largely constant for almost 2000 years, as an amalgam of Aristotle and Cicero’s concept of speech designed to persuade and Quintilian’s educational concept of the science of speaking well and showing moral goodness. (The Platonic dismissal of rhetoric as mere flattery, insincerity and cosmetic ornament is, of course, even older.) In the past two decades, an increasing number of scientists have become aware of the importance of persuading and speaking well. Donald McCloskey (1985, 1990, 1994), for example, has called for a turning away from positivism and towards rhetoric, specifically in economics but implicitly in all the social and natural sciences.¹ McCloskey is easily able to show that although a majority of economists pay lip-service to a positivist model dating from the 1940s, they actually use rhetoric, most of the time: ‘In italics: everyone, without exception, “uses rhetoric” in all their verbal or mathematical work, without exception. Rhetoric is merely speech that has designs on the reader [sic]’ (McCloskey, 1994, p. xiv).