Fred Foldvary wrote:  
  
> Not in science.  Axioms for science need to be based  
> on observed reality.  For example, an axiom in  
> economic theory is that human desires tend to be  
> unlimited, an axiom explicitly stated, for example, by  
> Henry George in Progress and Poverty.    
>  
> This axiom is not "self evident."  We can imagine a  
> society in which everyone is fully satiated.  We can  
> be confident of its truth from observation and  
> induction, including introspection, the observation of  
> one' own desires. (I also ask in economics classes if  
> there is any student who is completely satisfied, and  
> wants nothing more, and nobody raises a hand.)  
  
This is, of course, nonsense. Axioms in "science", which appear in deductive theoretical
systems, are selected in order to generate the "serious" theorems in a particular
scientific field. Go reread Hilbert's "Axiomatisches Denken" (1918) from which all of this
kind of thinking about scientific axioms for systems, specifically in the first instance
in physics, flowed. "Reality" or ""truth, as in "obviously true or self-evident (or not
self-evident) [to whom?] axioms", play no role whatsoever. Indeed, in Hilbert and von
Neumann's axiomatization of quantum mechanics, nothing associated with any axiomatization
is remotely obvious, or observable, or sensible, or even interpretable in ordinary
language or "pictures". Or go look at von Neumann's axiomatization of two person zero sum
game theory (1927).
  
This is dealt with in detail in my Chapter 3, "Whose Hilbert?" of _How Economics Became a
Mathematical Science_, and in considerably more detail in the historian of mathematics and
physics Leo Corry's recent volume
_David Hilbert and the Axiomatization of Physics (1898-1918): From Grundlagen Der
Geome__trie to Grundlagen Der Physik.
  
It really is past time that individuals who wish to talk about the history of economics in
its relation to mathematics and physics ignore what historians of mathematics and physics
have to say about mathematics and physics. Ex cathedra pontifications by historians of
economics about the proper role of axioms in science, a fortiori in economics, have no
place in reasoned scholarly discourse.
  
Historians of economics serve no community of scholars in reinventing the wheel,
especially square wheels, each year.
  
E. Roy Weintraub