 McCloskey’s studies of the rhetoric of economics have been valuable and influential (1985, esp. ch. 5–7, McCloskey and Ziliak 2003, Ziliak and McCloskey 2008), but a great deal of her work during the 1980s and 1990s consists of philosophical critiques of economic methodology rather than studies of the rhetoric of economics. Her philosophical critiques are problematic, because the position sketched in the previous paragraph is hard to defend and potentially self-defeating. It is hard to defend, because epistemological standards have already influenced the conversation of economists. The standards of predictive success which lead one to have qualms about economics are already standards that many economists accept. The only way to escape these doubts is to surrender the standards that gave rise to them. But McCloskey’s position undermines any principled argument for a change in standards. Furthermore, as Rosenberg has argued (1988), it seems that economists would doom themselves to irrelevance if they were to surrender standards of predictive success, for it is upon such standards that policy decisions are made.