| dbp:text
|
- It might have happened to you that you were carrying a pile of papers, or clothes, and didn't notice that you dropped a few. The decrease in the total weight you were carrying was probably not large enough for you to notice. Two objects may be too close in terms of weight for us to notice the difference between them. This problem is common to perception in all our senses. If I ask whether two rods are of the same length or not, there are differences that will be too small for you to notice. The same would apply to your perception of sound , light, temperature, and so forth... (en)
- Can we assign a set of numbers to the various entities and predict that the entity with the largest assigned number will be chosen? If so, we could christen this measure "utility" and then assert that choices are made so as to maximize utility. It is an easy step to the statement that "you are maximizing your utility", which says no more than that your choice is predictable according to the size of some assigned numbers. For analytical convenience it is customary to postulate that an individual seeks to maximize something subject to some constraints. The thing or numerical measure of the "thing" which he seeks to maximize is called "utility". Whether or not utility is of some kind glow or warmth, or happiness, is here irrelevant; all that counts is that we can assign numbers to entities or conditions which a person can strive to realize. Then we say the individual seeks to maximize some function of those numbers. Unfortunately, the term "utility" has by now acquired so many connotations, that it is difficult to realize that for present purposes utility has no more meaning than this. (en)
- These terms, which seem to have been introduced by Hicks and Allen , bear scant if any relation to the mathematicians' concept of ordinal and cardinal numbers; rather they are euphemisms for the concepts of order-homomorphism to the real numbers and group-homomorphism to the real numbers. (en)
|
