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Tony Brewer writes: 
>>  The mainstream doesn't  
> >  normally abuse others. It ignores them, which is far more deadly. 
 
Greg Ransom responds:  
> In fact, rather than simply ignore rival explanatory strategies, what 
> folks do is what analytic philosophers have done to the later work of 
> Wittgenstein -- they falsely attribute an unpromising set of commitments 
> [usually out of gross ignorance] to rival understandings in order to 
> denigrate otherwise potent alternatives to their own troubled 
> intellectual project.  Again, focusing only on one area familiar to me, I 
> can site the work of a dozen 'top' mainstreamers grappling with the work 
> of Friedrich Hayek -- beginning with Kenneth Arrow and including such 'big 
> names' as Stiglitz, Samuelson, Hurwicz, and others.  [I discuss some of 
> this with full citations in my 1996 HES "Hayek's Myth's" paper].   
 
This kind of argument is historically ignorant, reflecting the  
observation by the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward that "Lost  
causes, especially those that foster loyalties and nostalgic  
memories, are among the most prolific breeders of historiography. If  
survivors deem the cause not wholly lost and in perhaps in some  
measure retrievable, the search of the past becomes more frantic and  
the books about it more numerous. Blame must be fixed, villains  
found, heroes celebrated, old dreams restored, and motives  
vidictated. Amid the ruins controversy thrives and books  
proliferate." 
 
Ransom would have us believe that "falsely attibuting an unpromising  
set of commitments" is something that one does in the spirit of "I  
don't give a $%*& about Hayek and couldn't care less what he said,  
no matter that my own work is a failure." 
 
A less paranoid, or conspiritorial, view of the matter would argue  
that someone like Arrow, engaged in his own projects, constructing  
his own linkages among ideas, allies, theories, data, tools,   
concepts -- deploying his own troops in Latour-Callon  networks --  
understands Hayek only though his own Arrow-world, one he projects as  
it were onto Hayek. For Arrow is not an historian, obligated to  
understand another's views from the inside: he is an economist, a  
kind of scientist, obligated to make sense of his world with tools  
brought along and remade, and ideas learned and reforged. To assert  
that Arrow would have been better off abandoning his own projects,  
and taking up Hayek's, is just silly.  
 
Go back and take a look again at Kuhn on interpretation and  
persuasion in his 1968 Postscript to the Structure of  Scientific  
Revolutions, where (after denying that he is a relativist) he goes  
after the nature and understanding of "incommensurability". 
 
E. Roy Weintraub, Professor of Economics 
Director, Center for Social and Historical Studies of Science 
Duke University 
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