Differential Incompleteness: Value Disputes Are Missing Dimensions

For 250 years economics has hidden behind a Latin shrug. De gustibus non est disputandum: about tastes there is no disputing. When two people weight competing values differently, the doctrine says there is no fact of the matter, and the best you can do is split the difference. This paper argues the doctrine is wrong, and that most of what it has been protecting is not taste at all. It is missing dimensions. Each party weights the value-dimensions its position makes legible and silently drops the rest, so the disagreement is not a clash of ends but the interference pattern between two partial instruments. I call this differential incompleteness. Three consequences follow: a value dispute is diagnostic, pointing at the dimension a basis omits; the completeness of a basis is objective even where the weights inside it are not; and the resolution is completion, not compromise. The theory is falsifiable, and its predictions are stated. The claim is not that all value disagreement dissolves, but that we have been calling far too much of it irreducible when it was merely incomplete, and that the two can now be told apart. A separable final section offers a philosophical interpretation, that the target completion reaches toward is social utility, which a reader may decline without losing the theory.