E. Roy Weintraub wrote: > Ex cathedra pontifications by historians of economics about the proper role of axioms in science, It seems to me that merely looking up the word in the dictionary is sufficient to rescue anybody from a charge of mere "pontification." The dictionary use, however, does not exclude the same term being used in analogous senses in specific fields. Nor is it my place to contend with von Neuman, who operates in an intellectual space 10 orders of magnitude, at least, above my own, and who is one of the authentic geniuses of the 20th century. Yet I very much suspect that his system of axioms is not arbitrary, but something that can easily be accepted by those who work in those rarefied spaces, thus preserving the analogous sense of axiom. Even in philosophy, something generally accepted can be treated as an axiom, but this is somewhat dangerous, since such things as slavery and the inferiority of women have, at times, been taken for axioms of social thought. Such axioms must always be open to examination and revision. Far more useful to this discussion would be an explication of the necessary and sufficient conditions to treat an economic postulate as an axiom. John C. Medaille