On 8 Jul 2004 at 19:56, Humberto Barreto wrote: 
> My answer to the original question would be, "It depends.  Do you mean 
> indifference in a general sense or do you mean indifference in the 
> sense of a contour line or level curve?"  
 
Bert has in my view correctly framed the serious issue. The original  
query, while innocuous sounding, was ill-posed. We have known  
certainly since the early 1960s, with Kuhn's question " Did Priestley  
or Lavoisier 'discover' oxygen?", that concepts change even as their  
labels do not, and that as the full context of a scientific idea, the  
'paradigm' in which it functions, changes, so does the idea, so that  
there are possible incommensurabilites between apparently identical  
concept-words.  It is thus historically non-trivial to ask about the  
first use of concept-word X, and one of the roles of an historian is  
to provide a rich contextualizing discussion of that word-concept.  
 
My own partial attempt to get at the problem Bert identified was in  
"Is 'Is a Precursor of' a Transitive Relation?", South Atlantic  
Quarterly, 94:2, pp. 571-589, 1995. [Reprinted (in a different form)  
in Andrea Salanti and Ernesto Screpanti (eds.) Pluralism in  
Economics: New Perspectives in History and Methodology. Cheltenham,  
UK: Edward Elgar, 1996, pp. 212-226. Reprinted in Barbara Herrnstein  
Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky, (eds.) Mathematics, Science, and  
Postclassical Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998, pp.  
173-188.] 
 
E. Roy Weintraub 
Duke University