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Steve Fuller quite reasonably maintains that it would not be foolish to  
assert that: 
> "When I [Fuller] say that economics today is more rigorous  
> now than it was in 1900, 
> I mean to be appealing to this field's current usage of 'rigor'. The fact 
> that 'rigor' has meant different things in different times and places is a 
> red herring, unless you can show that our neglect of this fact somehow 
> hampers what the field is currently trying to do." 
>  
He suggested that my own take on this argument is not clear, and  
asked me 
> Is part of your goal to get economists to become better economists by 
> attending to their history, or is it simply to get historians of 
> economics to become better historians?  Your manifesto suggests your 
> aspirations are limited to the latter, but your latest missive suggests 
> you may be on to something more ambitious, like Mirowski. 
 
In reply:  My point really WAS  limited to getting "historians of  
economics to become better historians". This was the subject of  
my original "Editorial", and related to Ted Porter's point in his  
"Comment" on Schabas, namely that economists arguing about historical  
issues produce quite thin histories. In that context, discussions  
about rigor carried on by economists concerned about their discipline  
and its nature and practice and future slide over into historical  
argumentation, and back to criticism of current practice, without often  
noticing the shifts. In recent years (since the late 1980s) I've tried to  
de-couple these arguments in my own writing, and in fact have tried  
to stay away entirely from discourse in economics  
as opposed to history of economics. Phil Mirowski is my friend,  
but we are on different paths.  
 
Roy Weintraub 
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