----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 [log in to unmask] ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]