CHOICE, EXPECTATIONS AND MEASURABILITY.

The article discusses choice, expectations and measurability in economics. For historical, and also accidental, reasons, in the folds of the ordinalist description of consumer's choice there was couched much more than the ordinalists intended to accept. It is doubtful that proponents ever have been aware of this and, thus, their very own arguments became the chrysalis of the cardinalist doctrine. The cardinalist argument rests upon two unwarranted assumptions. In the first place, the oversimplified pattern of human behavior ignores the irreducibility of wants. It is this assumption which leaked also into the ordinalist argument and which made it possible to use the real number system for ordering all nonequivalent alternatives. In the second place, credibility is also ignored with the consequence that the background for unpredictable results is reduced to probability. It is, however, possible to avoid this conflict and still have a consistent theory of consumer's choice. Incidentally, this theory is equally valid for explaining not only consumer's choice, but also choice in general.