Unfortunately, I have to say something that must go *on-list*:
You wrote:
"I am glad to hear that Jerry is not one of those arguing for keeping the archives secret. Frankly when I got really annoyed about this (aside from Jerry on another list denying that I had been kept off for the reasons he had told me had kept me off for), was when I saw a paper somewhere in which somebody referenced an OPE-L archival discussion. Excuse me, but I find it offensive to cite sources that are not publicly available."
I plead innocent with extenuating circumstances. Yep, this "somebody" was probably me. Don't shoot the messenger.
Last year, I published a paper in the RRPE, "The Okishio Theorem: An Obituary." The theorem is generally understood as a refutation of Marx's law of the tendential fall in the profit rate. In my paper, I explained why the TSS critique of the theorem actually refutes it -- obtains a contrary result without altering any of its premises -- rather than merely getting a different result by means of different premises.
Had I left matters at that, my argument could easily have been dismissed by referring to premises that we have allegedly altered. Specifically, one might say that Okishio assumes one-shot technical innovation and/or that prices are stationary after innovation, and we alter those premises. Now, these exact points had been made in the course of the OPE-L debate over the Okishio theorem. But we had also answered them! To make sure that my argument couldn't be dismissed so easily, I decided to answer these objections also in print, and cited the sources as fully as I could -- i.e., as fully as the closed archives policy allows.
(BTW, my answer is that (1) no one would have taken the theorem seriously had they thought its scope was so limited as these reinterpretations imply and (2) no version of the theorem explicitly states these things as assumptions, thereby altering readers to the fact that it holds only under the most implausible restrictions. Therefore the theorem-as-stated is false.)
Of course, I could have simply presented the objections as hypothetical ones ("It may be argued that ..."), but that would not have been honest. They had actually been lodged. They had been the bases on which people were refusing to acknowledge that we had refuted the theorem. And putting the matter as a hypothetical would have looked like I was setting up a straw person.
I think it was also important to inform readers that there *has* been a debate about these matters, so that if they wonder why they haven't heard about the TSS interpretation, they'll know the reason is not that it's some crackpot stuff that people are rightly ignoring, and the reason is not that it hasn't stood the test of time.
The *real* problem here, of course, is that our critics have not been very interested, to put it mildly, in debating us in public. Not only has little appeared in print, but the place where most real debate has taken place, OPE-L, is also closed to the public. Had the objections been in the public domain, I of course would have been delighted to cite public sources.
It is a continuing problem. Ted McGlone and I have another paper coming out soon in ROPE, in which, to the annoyance of skeptical referees, we again had to refer to private conversations (some of which took place on OPE-L) and conference discussions. So, again, the closed archives policy serves certain interests:
A rabbi is playing golf on the Sabbath, and keeps making hole-in-one after hole-in-one. Up in heaven, Moses and God are watching, and Moses is getting angry with God. "The rabbi is violating the Sabbath, and you're letting him get these holes-in-one?!" God replies, "Nu, he's going to tell someone?"
Ciao
Drewk
Andrew ("Drewk") Kliman Home: Dept. of Social Sciences 60 W. 76th St., #4E Pace University New York, NY 10023 Pleasantville, NY 10570 (914) 773-3951 Andrew_Kliman at msn.com
"... the *practice* of philosophy is itself *theoretical.* It is the *critique* that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea." -- K.M.