In the history of economic thought Otto Neurath, who is known foremost for spearheading the development of the Vienna Circle of philosophers, has served largely as a foil for his advocacy of in-kind calculation and economic planning. Yet Neurath, who was trained as an economist and wrote extensively about economics, including its philosophical foundations, held an abiding interest in the use of language in science, and was strongly influenced by turn-of-the-twentieth-century conventionalists, among them Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem. Consequently, Neurath’s critique of what he saw as the conceptual flaws of economics and its too narrow framework as price theory was rooted as much in its imprecise and ‘unsorted’ use of language as in his critical view of capitalism. As such, he anticipated the ‘linguistic turn’ in economics that gained prominence only a half-century later, without any recognition of his presaging role.

Milton Friedman (1968)—his famous Presidential Address to the American Economic Association—contains an elementary error right at the heart of what is usually supposed to be the paper’s crucial argument. That is the argument to the effect that during an inflation, changing expectations shift the Phillips curve. It is suggested that the fact of this mistake and of its having gone all but unnoticed are points of historical interest. Further reflections, drawing on the arguments of Forder (2014), Macroeconomics and the Phillips Curve Myth, are suggested.