ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to organize the meanings of profit round a highly abstract notion, that of the formal operation which all such meanings may be held to involve. Profit appears, in its first aspect, as the focus gain of the selected enterprise. It is thus acting as the incentive of enterprise or of investment. The focus gain is itself a dual valuation of one and the same thing, of the kind necessary to seek for as a meaning of profit. If profit is expectational, its analysis must be conducted in some expectational language. The expectations thus abandoned may themselves, of course, have been formulated in the wake of an earlier occurrence of a resolutional profit. Whereas profit in its first guise appears as part of the incentive to action, to choice of practical conduct, in its second guise, as resolutional profit, it appears as an incentive to think.
