ABSTRACT
In the last decades of the twentieth century, methodological inquiries into economics took a linguistic turn, much as was the case for other disciplines, including, notably, history. This linguistic turn has clearly animated discussion of methodology in economics in recent times: economics has been recognized as a discourse, its disputes as to content recast as differences in rhetoric, its schools of thought seen as possible constructions of knowledge, its models re-formed into narratives, its writings treated as literature. One can see the operation of plausible conjecture in the emergence of the labour theory of value, a foundational matter in the recasting of political economy by classical economists as they rejected the precepts of the mercantilists. For one, applying mathematics as a tool is not the same as thinking mathematically, where the ambiguities and conflicts within mathematics and mathematical reasoning would figure in economic thinking as one might ponder as the scope and nature of axiomatization.
