ABSTRACT
Epistemics or axiomatics: that is the question. Axiomatics defines information, knowledge, and expectations as identical constructs. Furthermore, it denies that there exists choice beyond the pale of perfect rationality and consequently finds no place for the faculty of imagination. Shackle rejected axiomatics because he believed that these epistemic constructs were distinct and that uncertainty and imagination were legitimate objects of inquiry. He was clear about where things had gone wrong, too (Time comes into it…). Specifically, he suggested that theorists had misconstrued the temporal structure of the economic universe and the locus of the agent in the space-time continuum. Death and taxes aside, events generally have to happen before we know about them with certainty. He also observed that agents are not isotropic entities smeared uniformly over the space-time continuum. The agent does not exist at all points in space-time but rational choice theory is mathematically set up as if this is so, a fiction that is arguably the most fundamental in economic theory. 1
