Arrow assumed that social orderings will be derived, if at all, from information about people’s preferences. This information is, in his framework, merely ordinal. It is the kind of information that is implicated in Condorcet’s paradox of voting, in Section 1, where each person ranks the alternatives from better to worse but there is nothing beyond this about how strong anybody’s preferences are, or about how the preferences of one person compare in strength to those of another. In confining aggregation procedures to ordinal information, Arrow argued that: 