A Philosophical Foundation for the Salles Test

# A Philosophical Foundation for the Salles Test ## TLDR The Salles Test is a test saying that $X$ is not MEV if there does not exists a previledged actor/monopoly for $X$. Now, we provide a philosophical foundation for it. "$X$ is MEV" is equivalent with "there exists a " ## Argument First, note that not all value is MEV, the utterance of MEV has some presuppositions to the value. For example, the value that the users would be getting absent the Monarch is not MEV. Concretely, in prisoner dilemma with both betraying generating payoff of (1,1), the (1,1) is not MEV. In [This is MEV](https://hackmd.io/3pOIwjbORd-MJOZM4OUJWw?view), we defined MonarchEV + MolochEV to be PoA(worst Eq absent present Monarch, best Eq present best Monarch). So MEV conditions on the present Monarch (if exists a Monarch). This mean by the utterance of MEV we are having a presupposition of the existence of a Monarch. Thus, with the absence of the Monarch, the utterance of the sentence/claim that has the word of MEV in it is false (if we have a Fregean/Russell interpretation of semantics, that the presupposition is an existential statement), and if we take a Wittgenstein interpretation of semantics (language games), then the sentence might be true (because the context is social and ppl might agree on some weird notion of the game, if the sentence is presented without context, then the sentence is nonsense and has no truth value). So ultimately the test of MEV also conditions on which philosophical interpretation of language you agree with, if you are Wittgenstein and believes that the utterance is within the context where it is socially agreed that the Monarch is existent, then that value is indeed MEV. Moreover, this philosophical interpretation of the non-MEVness test aligns with the empirical result: “if the value is extracted without a monopolistic/privileged party/coordinator, then the value is not MEV.” To conclude, our test for non-MEV is having a conservative standard on the context/utterance of MEV by taking a Fregean/Russell standpoint.