Hm. I’d been meaning to ask about this apparent circularity in the foundations for a bit, and now this tells me the answer is “we don’t know yet”.
(Specifically: VNM proves the analogue of the “will-to-wager” assumption, but of course it assumes our usual notion of probability. Meanwhile Dutch book argument proves that you need our usual notion of probability—assuming the notion of utility! I guess we can say these at least demonstrate the two are equivalent in some sense. :P )
Savage’s representation theorem in Foundations of Statistics starts assuming neither. He just needs some axioms about preference over acts, some independence concepts and some pretty darn strong assumptions about the nature of events.
So it’s possible to do it without assuming a utility scale or a probability function.
Hm. I’d been meaning to ask about this apparent circularity in the foundations for a bit, and now this tells me the answer is “we don’t know yet”.
(Specifically: VNM proves the analogue of the “will-to-wager” assumption, but of course it assumes our usual notion of probability. Meanwhile Dutch book argument proves that you need our usual notion of probability—assuming the notion of utility! I guess we can say these at least demonstrate the two are equivalent in some sense. :P )
Savage’s representation theorem in Foundations of Statistics starts assuming neither. He just needs some axioms about preference over acts, some independence concepts and some pretty darn strong assumptions about the nature of events.
So it’s possible to do it without assuming a utility scale or a probability function.
I suppose this would be a good time to point anyone stumbling on this thread to my post that I later wrote on that theorem. :)