================= HES POSTING ================= 
 
Brewer comments that: 
 
> Robin Foliet Neill complained of 'citing an author while moving the 
> substance of the author's material into an alternative and competing 
> paradigm'.  
 
There is, in my view, a too quick move to judgment in this  
discussion. The original question was of the form "Why no citation  
...?" and this has been taken to be a legitimate question which  
deserves an answer.  
 
But certainly citation is contingent, not necessary, to a discipline,  
and the history of citation practices is an historical issue, not a  
moral one. Put another way, "Why cite?". Posed this way, we have a  
question which leads to questions concerning the role of citation,  
whether there are multifarious roles, and how citation practices  
arise in particular communities in particular circumstances serving  
particular functions.  
 
This is not an exceptional observation. There is a rich  
subdisciplinary literature in the (older Mertonian) sociology of  
science on citation practices -- see many of Arthur Diamond's papers  
applying this to economics, and George Stigler's -- and the SSI and  
SSCI have spawned interesting research literatures. The rhetoric of  
science itself is intertwined with such questions of legitimizing  
some, but not other, modes of argumentation. 
 
In economics we have a recognition, as Brewer notes, of particular  
local and contingent community practices concerning citation:  
Cambridge had its own way of doing this in the interwar years,  
which led Gunnar Myrdal in his 1939 English version of _Monetary  
Equilibrium_ to speak, in the introduction, of the Anglo-Saxon (read  
Cambridge) predilection for unnecessary originality deriving from a  
systematic inability to read the Germanic languages. 
 
Certainly citation practices serve to enlist allies in Latour's  
reconstruction of scientific practice, to interlink current arguments  
with those of the past so that questioning the current work forces  
the reader to question whether the past work must also be  
questioned. Other sociologists, historians, and cultural theorists of  
science have asked such questions, and others,  about citations.  
 
Do historians of economics have so much less to say? 
 
E. Roy Weintraub 
E-mail: [log in to unmask] 
 
============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ 
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]