The passages from Ricardo and Smith make me wish I knew the mathematics to read that expression of it, just to better imaginatively grasp the contrast. This reminds me of a situation at the University of Michigan in the1950s, as told by friends who had editing posts in the Engineering Research Institute there.
It seemes there was this person (I forget what dept he was in -- physics, psychology, whatever, but he did research in sight) who had large grants from the Navy Dept. The editors would have to turn his research reports into English, which they found almost impossible to do without destroying them.
One of his "discoveries." He would place one subject in a room all 6 of whose sides were painted white. He would have placed a dot somewhere on the walls, floor, or ceiling. Then he would time how long it took the subject to locate the dot. Then he would place two subjects in the room and time how long it would take one or the other to locate the dot. He would then express in 15 to 20 pages of complex prose the discovery that two subjects were apt to locate the dot more quickly than one searching alone.
In another experiment he would vary the light in the room. He discovered (and reported the discovery at some length) that the more light there was the more quickly the subject would locate the dot. He spent hundreds of thousands a year (in 1950s money -- when a Med School professor's salary was only 10,000) in conducting such experiments. To express them in ordinary language was to destroy them.
The question was did he deceive himself with his own language -- did he "sincerely," that is, believe he was discovering something -- or was it a conscious rip-off of the Navy.
Carrol