Rob,
    Perhaps you intend to be amusing and ironic, but given the tone of recent exchanges here, using such language as "crime against rationality," "lying," "dishonest, "potential suspect," and "culpable" requires in my view a bit more seriousness than you have shown to be used so repeatedly in posts here.  For the record, I agree with everything that Alan Isaac has posted on this matter, however, I feel the need to add a bit more.
     For starters, of course Keynes was not at all a fan of "rationality," certainly as it pertains to economics and how economic agents decide and act.  He had multiple problems with the concept, starting with his Treatise on Probability where he discusses a range of epistemological conditions regarding probability from the classic radical ("Knightian" or "Keynesian") uncertainty in which no probability distribution can be assigned or even thought to exist (a view that von Mises held about certain events and that Nassim Taleb now calls a "black swan") through an intermediate range of states of degrees of knowability that most people forget (or mostly never knew he discussed) that are not easily characterized wherein probability becomes gradually more identifiable and knowable to the other extreme of quantifiable "risk," which he in fact recognized does exist, providing the example of tossing a fair coin, although how one knows that a coin is fair or not is still a problem, but concluding with observing that indeed there is a functioning insurance industry that generally does make profits based on estimating probabilities of possible occurrences.  His emphasis on clearly irrational "animal spirits" in his discussion of investment behavior and many other related ideas all point to his emphasis on the importance of irrationality in economic decisionmaking, even as he does not simply reject it in toto.  If this large corpus of well-known argumentation by him (and more) is "criminal," so be it.
     I agree with Alan that you have not remotely provided a coherent criticism of Wittgentstein's ideas or why defending Wittgensteins's ideas would make one "culpable" or whatever.
     As it is, if one is going to dump on Wittgenstein, it must be asked "which Wittgenstein?"  Like many famous scholars and thinkers, the ideas of Wittgenstein changed over time.  He was in his earlier years, particularly at the time of the 1915 encounter with Keynes and Russell that you seem to think is so terribly important (and awful), he was very much oriented in favor of logical and rational analysis, if not as much so as Russell.  But even in his early work he was clearly aware that such analysis had its limits, as most famously indicated by the concluding lines of his Tractatus.  Following that, and his famous encounter with Sraffa on a train, he moved in another direction that I suspect is what you find to be anti-rational, and I agree with Alan's take on that matter.  I would note in this regard that indeed Wittgenstein's later ideas are highly controversial, with many philosophers admiring them deeply, while others disagree and dislike them.  I did a quick scan of several lists of "world's greatest philosophers" (anywhere from 5 to 20, usually 10) and found that Wittgenstein appears on about half of them, one of them as high as third place, but that Russell barely appears on any and never ahead of Wittgenstein when he does so.
     Regarding Russell, without question he regularly and strongly defended a rationalistic materialist Aristotelianism against what he considered to be dangerous, possibly evil, emotional idealistic Platonism, with such figures as Hegel being particular targets of his wrath, and it must be granted that Hegel and some others Russell criticized can be linked to very unpleasant political movements in the 20th century that led to many people being killed.  Nevertheless, Russell himself was fully aware that there are limits to the use of logic and reason, even if he would view these as far too esoteric to be of relevance to the sorts of discussions he engaged in when he was whomping on Hegel and others he saw as dangerously "irrational" (and I am unaware that he ever saw Wittgenstein as being anywhere nearly as bad as Hegel or some of these others, although I could stand to be corrected on this point).  In any case, it was Russell himself who discerned a famous paradox in set theory that foreshadowed deeper problems and limits of logic as discovered and laid out by Kurt Godel some years later.  Russell was as aware as both Wittgenstein and Keynes that reason has its limits, even if the three of them almost certainly disagreed regarding the proper delineation of those limits.
     In any case, aside perhaps from irony, which I have found few hints of in your discourse, I think this language of crime and culpability and lying really serves only a distracting and annoying purpose in this discussion (and why are we concerned with Wittgenstein on a history of economics list anyway?).
Barkley Rosser

-----Original Message-----
From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Rob Tye
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2014 5:59 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] Keynes and Honesty

Dear Alan,

Let me attempt again to clarify my position here.  I share  the view of Russell and others, which resembles a charge that the promotion of Wittgenstein's philosophy was a crime against rationality.

I chose to act as detective on that matter.  Since Keynes was spotted near the scene of the crime (promoting Wittgenstein, and denigrating Newton too!), he needs to be treated as a potential suspect.  

My request to group was for leads regarding new evidence, for or against, his culpability.

Your mail contains no new evidence.  It just reiterates what Keynes himself argued.  I assure you I already understood that.  When a suspect offers an alibi, a good detective has a duty to check it.  After all, as the delightful Mandy Rice Davis reputedly stated "He would say that, wouldn't he?"

Disappointing that I have received no new leads.

Rob Tye, York, UK