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Thanks to Robert Brown and to Mat Forsater for their responses.
Norman Malcolm is pretty definitive. I also had forgotten the "tree
without its branches" quote from the preface to the Investigations. I
guess my skepticism stems from a certain discomfort I have with a
kind of apotheosis of Sraffa that I encounter too often among my neo-
Ricardian friends. This anecdote really feeds that, by making Sraffa in
part responsible for one of the most important philosophical
developments of the century. But I stand--or sit, at any rate--corrected!
Since we're talking about Wittgenstein, I'll share an aphorism from
*Culture and Value* that seems to me to have some resonance for
those familiar with the state of mainstream economic theory:
"There is no religious denomination in which the misuse of
metaphysical expressions has been responsible for so much sin as it
has in mathematics."
Kevin Quinn
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