Knight wrote paradoxically on purpose because language cannot capture complex economic reality.

Evidence

His quarrel was with the nature of language itself: he was not willing to accept the intentional elisions that are entailed in the pro cess of expressing thought and experience in discernible signs. He regretted the linguistic mandate of reducing a complex world to much simpler sentences. … In his prose Knight responded to this problem by adopting a relentlessly paradoxical style that drew attention to its own elisions in order to gesture toward truths that resisted linguistic reduction. Needless to say, this approach remained uncommon within the economics profession. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 126

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the theme from One Square Inch of Silence and soundscape reading: the irreducible loss in representation — here language’s elisions versus acoustic/aesthetic ones. — connects to: Market discourse cannot be analyzed apart from real market realities. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 579; Knight shaped Friedman’s worldview about economics’ limits rather than specific doctrines. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 398
• SEED: Angle: ‘the economist who refused to persuade’ — a profile of Knight as a deliberately anti-rhetorical public intellectual, contrasting with today’s economist-commentator class.

Broader Connections

• Market discourse cannot be analyzed apart from real market realities. #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 579
• Knight shaped Friedman’s worldview about economics’ limits rather than specific doctrines. #expands (0.75) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 398