Economic method and economic rhetoric

McCloskey's work on the rhetoric of economics has little to say about Imre Lakatos, and indeed the scientific method prescribed by Lakatos, as it stands, would support McCloskey's claim that philosophers' imperatives bear little relation to what economists actually do. But a Bayesianized version of Lakatos is a different matter, and provides a yardstick against which the various rhetorical devices noted by McCloskey can be measured. We argue that McCloskey's list can be divided into those forms of persuasion which would and would not remain convincing once the reader saw how the persuasion was being worked, and that this distinction corresponds precisely to those forms of persuasion which do and do not represent the 'Bayesianized Lakatos' method.