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I don't agree with the *moral* accent that Robin Neill tends to give to 
this discussion. Failure to cite is certainly a moral question, as are all 
lies. In order to examine a particular case from a moral point of view, 
one has to consider a bunch of aspects that are crucial in defining a) 
whether there is a moral fault and b) how severe it is. Is it intentional? 
Is it culturally tolerable, in the sense that citation standards were not 
same at the time as they are in contemporary scientific work?  Is it a 
reactive action, as in Pat Gunning's example, where Davenport apparently 
decided not to mention Fetter after being criticized by him? 
 
However, this does not seem to be the crucial issue in the discussion. 
The moral standing of a failure to cite is not as critical as Neill seems 
to consider it to be when he talks about "citing an author while moving 
the substance of the author's material into an alternative and competing 
paradigm." Neill says that this is a critical question for the history of 
economic thought, which "ought to be the discipline that keeps paradigms 
in order, and remains faithful to author's intentions," an ideal that 
"has not been honoured in much that passes," since the "usual practice is 
a partisan attempt to subsume every piece of information that can be 
subsumed into a favoured paradigm, and to dismiss or ignore any 
information that cannot" etc.  Neill goes on enumerating ways of doing 
these mistakes: selective citation, reinterpretation of ideas or even 
(supreme horror!) an "attempt to suppress the paradigm in which the idea 
first appeared." 
 
The canonization process that typifies the history of economic thought 
turns these misinterpretations into expected/necessary outcomes, a similar 
process to what occurs in in every scientific field where paradigms are 
built. In her paper "Decanonizing discourses," published by Dudley-Evans 
and Backhouse in _Economics and language_, Brown describes the whig 
history of a discipline as a process through which certain contents 
acquire stability and the . There is nothing wrong with this, either from 
a moral point of view or as a tool for the accumulation of knowledge. 
 
Among the lessons that the rhetorical approach to economics has taught us, 
one of the most important is this feeling that "what the author really 
meant to say" (that is, the original meaning of the text) is less to 
important for the history of thought than the meaning that his qualified 
readers attribute to his text. No one can legitimately claim the custody 
of someone else's thought, no matter how careful his reading is supposed 
to be. We can agree with Neill that "partisan" approach is certainly to be 
avoided in scientific discourse, but the meaning of a text is given in the 
interaction process between the author and his audience, at the time when 
his work was made public and afterwards. Why would perceptive selection be 
less pervasive in economics than it is in other aspects of life? 
 
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