user@terminal ~ % fortune

"The original project was not to “reveal” preferences; the original project was to eliminate preferences from the theory of consumer choice. Utility theory, in all of its various renditions, characterized the consumer as an intentional and purposive economic agent; the individual was believed to be a certain way, have subjective preferences and/or a utility function and while these characteristics could be used to predict certain observational behaviors of the agent, these preferences were not themselves given an operational definition and were thus not scientifically meaningful. One solution, and the one that the profession eventually settled on, was to use Samuelson’s revealed preference theory as a technique for uncovering these intentional preferences, but that was not Samuelson’s original project. His original argument was that since utility and related preference concepts were not operationally defined, they were not observational and thus had no place in scientific economics. They would be replaced, according to the original approach, by operational procedures based on the observational and thus meaningful and scientific behavior of individual agents. As originally proposed, Samuelson’s theory was eliminativist its goal was to totally eliminate the subjective, intentional, notion of preference/utility from the theory of consumer choice (and thus all of economics) and as such it offered a rather radical alternative to the mainstream neoclassical theorizing of the (or this) day. It seems that philosophers such as Alexander Rosenberg (1992) who insist that mainstream economics is methodologically flawed because of its reliance on intentional folk-psychological concepts such as belief and desire would be quite sympathetic to the original goal of Samuelson’s operational theory of consumer choice."