John and Peirce list,
This is very shocking and sad news of the loss of a fine scholar and, in my estimation, a great soul. Over the years Arnold and I had a number of fruitful email exchanges on Peirce-l and privately. Late last year he sent me a report which included analyses relating to the theme you mentioned in your note to the Peirce list. You wrote:
[JC] Arnold was well on his way to giving a Peircean response to Arrow's paradox of social choice by rejecting Arrow's explicitly nominalist assumptions on ordering, using the idea of sequence instead, as found in Peirce.Arnold attached the paper to an off-list note which included these comments:
In another email earlier this year Arnold wrote that he wanted "to rewrite the report to take greater account of the Impossibility Tradition in economics (Kenneth Arrow, Amartya K Sen, and others), with a view to exploring ways that the logic of relations in this tradition might benefit from an explicitly Peircean reworking of the topic" Do you know if a completed version of the paper Arnold was working on is available, John? If so, would it be possible to make it available (perhaps Joe Ransdell could put it on Arisbe)?
Your mail discussing logica docens and logica utens in the classification of the sciences rang a bell for me [. . .] Earlier this year I completed a longish report on the problem of research policy in occupational health and safety in mining, in which, amongst other topics, I considered the role of the docens-utens classification in the process of evaluating research proposals in this field. Given that you have brought the subject up, but not anticipating any general interest on the list in my going-on about committees and research (about which Winston Churchill had some rather acerbic opinions, BTW), I thought I'd send you a PDF of the report just for something to read over the mid-semester break.. . I left out the second Appendix because that's available in the Intelex CP (it's CSP's Note on the Economy of Research).
This is interesting, Gary. I have a draft of Chapter 1 of Arnold's thesis, which is definitely not ready for publication, plus I have a final version of his thesis project when he died. This is fairly complete, as I recall, but I will need to look at it again. I remember the day I became convinced that Arnold really was on to something -- it was talking to him after I read this version of his proposal. Mostly, since then I was just getting him to be familiar with recent relevant work by philosophers on conventions. He found chapter 2 of Ruth Millikan's recent book, Language: A Biological Model very supportive of his approach, but diverging in the emphasis on the origins -- not on the historical aspect.
Cheers,
John
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Professor John Collier [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
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