A Non-Mathematical Explanation of the Axioms: http://www.axiomaticeconomics.com/axioms.php

This paper specifically addresses the applicability of my axioms, Peter.

Socrates and Hume at Billiards: http://www.axiomaticeconomics.com/socrates.php

This latter paper is a simulated dialogue between Socrates and David Hume over a game of billiards in heaven. They are visited by a swami and a physicist, both of whom counsel Socrates on where his billiard ball will go after he hits it with his cue ball. Then, Socrates and Hume contrast these two quotations:

David Hume: “When I see, for instance, a billiard ball moving in a straight line toward another,… may I not conceive that a hundred different events might as well follow from that cause?… All these suppositions are consistent and conceivable. Why then should we give preference to one which is no more consistent or conceivable than the rest?”

Cristobal Young: “Milton Friedman, torchbearer for the ‘free market’, insisted that the realism of background assumptions is not important. ‘In general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions’. Good theory may well make use of ‘wildly inaccurate’ assumptions, and proceed ‘as if’ the assumptions held true. The purpose of theory is to generate testable implications.”

Here I am quoting Cristobal Young’s review of Robert Nelson’s book, Economics as Religion, which Bouchard mentions in his paper.

Your website compares your model to that axiomatic treatment of probability articulated by Andrei Kolmogorov. That’s interesting, not least because Kolmogorov’s axioms mean his theory is not validly applicable to large swathes of human experience — eg, most practical reasoning involving uncertainty.

Are you saying that your theory, likewise, is limited in application?

1) One’s value scale is totally (linearly) ordered:

i) Transitive; p ? q and q ? r imply p ? r

ii) Reflexive; p ? p

iii) Anti-Symmetric; p ? q and q ? p imply p = q

iv) Total; p ? q or q ? p

2) Marginal (diminishing) utility, u(s), is such that:

i) It is independent of first-unit demand.

ii) It is negative monotonic; that is, u’(s)