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People who provide arguments are advocates.  It tells me nothing 
to identify that someone is providing an argument.  Is it history of 
ideas or just ideas to point out that, say, Darwin had extended and 
cast his picture of biology as X, instead of as Y, that his argument would 
have been more coherent and powerful, thus being accepted, rather than 
in fact is was, rejected by most biologists until the 1930's?  I haven't 
read Horwitz's article, or Cottrell's commentary, so I am merely pointing 
out that the quoted sentences Roy has provided don't help much in seeing 
the point, but I will take a look at them (after I get back from the 
Hayek archive at the Hoover Institution -- digging again for more 
'contextual 
history' for my own research project), and try to see what Weintraub's 
concern might be. 
 
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Here is another suggestion.  Lets take an example or two from 
outside of economics, but within a science of undesigned order with 
a bit of the same controversy about its fit to the philosophers/ 
scientists standard picture of 'knowledge' or 'science' (i.e. the picture 
inherited and evolved from Aristotle's picture, and in light of the 
materialism, mechanism, and 'modernism' of 17th-century philosophy and 
physics). 
 
Looking at examples in familiar but different context is how we point 
out illogical arguments, and how we highlight patterns and pictures in a 
place where our own place in the scene doesn't distort what we see so 
very badly.  I suggest that we look at Michael T. Ghiselin's _The Triumph 
of the Darwinian Method_, 1970 Pfizer Prize winner, and Ernst Mayr's 
_One Long Argument:  Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary 
Thought_.  Interestingly, both books provide 'augmentations' of Darwin's 
argument and reconstructions of it, pushing forward 'particular approaches' 
in different directions, and engaging in a good deal of what might 
correctly be labeled 'advocacy'.  If you wanted to, you might even call 
it 'Whig' history. 
 
Is there anyone who hasn't understood Darwin, and the history of Darwin's 
biology better after reading these books, or its place in intellectual 
history? 
 
Greg Ransom 
Dept. of Philosophy 
UC-Riverside 
[log in to unmask] 
http://members.aol.com/gregransom/ransom.htm 
 
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