Chamberlin and Robinson: their realism revisited and revised

Attempts to give greater realism to a general competitive equilibrium paradigm, such as, famously, by E.H. Chamberlin and Joan Robinson, founder on the excessive inferential potency of its assumptions, as, for example, in the familiar postulate that orders all possible preferences. Either the overtheorization must be restricted by illusory qualifying expressions such as ceteris paribus, which leave the inferential scheme unchanged, or the needed inferential steps are mathematically dubious, sometimes impermissible. A modified set of postulates are proposed for a more empirically sensitive economic science.