The cardinalist manifesto The epistemology of the measurability of utility

Since the ordinal revolution, economics has considered that utility is generally ordinal and that ordinalism is scientifically superior to cardinalism. This paper examines how this orthodoxy came to be by looking at the history of the epistemological debate in the economics journals which cemented the ordinalist orthodoxy in the middle of the 20th century. Ironically, after the debate ended, economics has quietly become increasingly cardinalist again. I show how this inconsistency between ordinalist epistemology and cardinalist practice developed. This paper aggregates and appraises the epistemological arguments to see how the epistemology of the debate applies today, fifty years after it ended and examine how our epistemology relates to our increasingly cardinalist body of utility theory. This paper argues that the ordinal revolution was an epistemological mistake and ordinalism does not accord with basic measurement theory.