ABSTRACT
In November 1979 Harvey Leibenstein of Harvard University gave a seminar at Simon Fraser University titled ‘Relaxing the maximization assumption in microeconomic theory’. Harvey said that he chose not to interpret the neoclassical maximization assumption as a tautology. I challenged Harvey by asserting that he did not know what a tautology is. Specifically, either a statement is a tautology or it is not. It is not a matter of one’s chosen interpretation. Tautologies are statements for which it is not logically possible to even conceive of a counterexample. In his June 1979 article, Leibenstein openly recognizes that ‘The main argument against the maximization postulate is an empirical onenamely, people frequently do not maximize’ [p. 494]. Thus, by recognizing that
the failure to maximize is obviously conceivable, Leibenstein must admit that the maximization hypothesis cannot be a tautology. One problem here is that economists have for a long time misused the term ‘tautology’. Their intention is to refer to statements that are true solely by virtue of how one defines the key (non-logical) words. For example, the statement ‘all swans are white’ could be considered true if we define swans as white birds or we define white as the color of swans. There are other definitions of ‘white’ and ‘swans’ for which the statement is conceivably false. Some philosophers might say that what economists mean by ‘tautology’ is an analytically true statement.
