Convention E-Book

David Lewis

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 356

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Convention was immediately recognized as a major contribution to the subject and its significance has remained undiminished since its first publication in 1969. Lewis analyzes social conventions as regularities in the resolution of recurring coordination problems-situations characterized by interdependent decision processes in which common interests are at stake. Conventions are contrasted with other kinds of regularity, and conventions governing systems of communication are given special attention.

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

I Coordination and Convention

1. Sample Coordination Problems

2. Analysis of Coordination Problems

3. Solving Coordination Problems

4. Convention

5. Sample Conventions

II Convention Refined

1. Common Knowledge

2. Knowledge of Conventions

3. Alternatives to Conventions

4. Degrees of Convention

5. Consequences of Conventions

III Convention Contrasted

1. Agreement

2. Social Contracts

3. Norms

4. Rules

5. Conformative Behavior

6. Imitation

IV Convention and Communication

1. Sample Signals

2. Analysis of Signaling

3. Verbal Signaling

4. Conventional Meaning of Signals

5. Meaningnn of Signals

V Conventions of Language

1. Possible Languages

2. Grammars

3. Semantics in a Possible Language

4. Conventions of Truthfulness

5. Semantics in a Population

Conclusion

Index

© 2002 by David Lewis

Editorial Offices:

108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK

Tel: [phone]

350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5018, USA

Tel: [phone]

The right of David Lewis to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published 1969 by Harvard University Press

First published in paperback 1986 by Basil Blackwell Ltd

Reissued 2002 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, a Blackwell Publishing company

Tranferred to digital print 2007

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN: 978-0-631-23256-8 — ISBN: 978-0-631-23257-5 (pb)

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For further information on Blackwell Publishers, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk

For Steffi

Acknowledgements

I owe a pleasant debt to Willard Van Orman Quine for his encouragement and help throughout my effort to rehabilitate analyticity. I am grateful to my friends for their comments on earlier and later versions. Special thanks are due to George Boolos, Charles Chastain, David Kaplan, Ewart Lewis, Stephanie Lewis, Barbara Partee, Stephen Schiffer, Michael Slote, J. Howard Sobel, and the students in my seminar on philosophy of language at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the fall term of 1967. Warm thanks of another sort are due to the C’est Si Bon Pâtisserie, where most of this book was written, for their hospitality and their good coffee. I thank David Shwayder for permission to quote at length from his book The Stratification of Behaviour.

D. K. L.

Los Angeles

June 1968

Introduction

It is the profession of philosophers to question platitudes that others accept without thinking twice. A dangerous profession, since philosophers are more easily discredited than platitudes, but a useful one. For when a good philosopher challenges a platitude, it usually turns out that the platitude was essentially right; but the philosopher has noticed trouble that one who did not think twice could not have met. In the end the challenge is answered and the platitude survives, more often than not. But the philosopher has done the adherents of the platitude a service: he has made them think twice.

It is a platitude that language is ruled by convention. Words might be used to mean almost anything; and we who use them have made them mean what they do because somehow, gradually and informally, we have come to an understanding that this is what we shall use them to mean. We could perfectly well use these words otherwise—or use different words, as men in foreign countries do. We might change our conventions if we like.

To say only this is not to say much. It is not to portray language in the image of a calculus, precise and rigid. It is not to uphold “correct” speech against colloquial, or vice versa. It is not to say that all the languages we can think of are equally good, or that every feature of a serviceable language might just as well have been different. It is not to say that necessary truths are created by convention: only that necessary truths, like geological truths, are conventionally stated in these words rather than in those. It is not to exalt the powers of convention as some “conventionalist” philosophers do, but only to insist that it is there. The platitude that there are conventions of language is no dogma of any school of philosophy, but commands the immediate assent of any thoughtful person—unless he is a philosopher.

For this mere platitude has been challenged. W. V. Quine questioned it in 1936 and later repudiated it outright.1 Morton White joined in the attack,2 and together they have persuaded some to share their doubts, and reduced many more to silence. Quine and White argue that the supposed conventions of language cannot be very much like the central, well-understood cases of convention. Conventions are agreements—but did we ever agree with one another to abide by stipulated rules in our use of language? We did not. If our ancestors did, how should that concern us, who have forgotten? In any case, the conventions of language could not possibly have originated by agreement, since some of them would have been needed to provide the rudimentary language in which the first agreement was made. We cannot even say what our conventions are, except by long trial and error. Did we know them better when we first adopted them? We have no concept of convention which permits language to be conventional; we are inclined to call some features of language conventional, but we cannot say why. We may indulge this inclination—Quine himself does3—but we do not understand language any better for doing it. Conclusion: the conventions of language are a myth. The sober truth is that our use of language conforms to regularities—and that is all.

We may protest, desperately, that there must be something to our notion of conventions of language, even if we cannot say what. When we are exposed to the notion we do all manage to get the idea, and all of us go on more or less alike in distinguishing between features of language we call conventional and features of language we do not. So we must mean something. Conventionality must at least be that, we know not what, which evokes a distinctive response in anyone who has been through our kind of education.

But how much better it would be to know what we are talking about: to have an analysis of convention in its full generality, including tacit convention not created by agreement. This book is my attempt at an analysis. I hope it is an analysis of our common, established concept of convention, so that you will recognize that it explains what you must have had in mind when you said that language—like many other activities—is governed by conventions. But perhaps it is not, for perhaps not all of us do share any one clear general concept of convention. At least, insofar as I had a concept of convention before I thought twice, this is either it or its legitimate heir. And what I call convention is an important phenomenon under any name. Language is only one among many activities governed by conventions that we did not create by agreeing and that we cannot describe.

My theory of convention had its source in the theory of games of pure coordination—a neglected branch of the general theory of games of von Neumann and Morgenstern, very different in method and content from their successful and better known theory of games of pure conflict. Coordination games have been studied by Thomas C. Schelling,4and it is he who supplied me with the makings of an answer to Quine and White.

Yet, in the end, the theory of games is scaffolding. I can restate my analysis of convention without it. The result is a theory along the lines of Hume’s, in his discussion of the origin of justice and property. Convention turns out to be a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. I observe that it will be to my interest [e.g.] to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. When this common sense of interest is mutually expressed and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behavior. And this may properly enough be called a convention or agreement betwixt us, though without the interposition of a promise; since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are performed upon the supposition that something is to be performed on the other part.5

1“Truth by Convention,” Philosophical Essays for A. N. Whitehead, ed. O. H. Lee (New York: Longmans, 1936); “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 20-46; “Carnap and Logical Truth,” The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. P. A. Schilpp (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1963), pp. 385-406; Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, and New York: John Wiley, 1960).

2“The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism,” John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: Dial, 1950), pp. 316-330; Toward Reunion in Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956).

3At the end of “Carnap and Logical Truth” where he says: “The lore of our fathers… is a pale grey lore, black with fact and white with convention.”

4The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).

5A Treatise of Human Nature, III.ii.2.

Foreword

When I was a child I pictured our language as settled and passed down by a board of syndics, seated in grave convention along a table in the style of Rembrandt. The picture remained for a while undisturbed by the question what language the syndics might have used in their deliberations, or by dread of vicious regress.

I suppose this picture has been entertained by many, in uncritical childhood. Many mature thinkers, certainly, have called language conventional. Many have also in other connections been ready with appeals to agreements that were historically never enacted. The social contract, in Hobbes’s theory of government, is the outstanding example. This case is logically more respectable than the language case; the notion that government began literally in a social contract involves no vicious regress.

Not, of course, that the proponents of the doctrine of social contract mean to be thus literally construed; they mean only that government is as if it had been thus established. But then this “as if ” proposition raises the question, psychoanalytically speaking, of latent content: in just what ways is government like what an actual social contract might have given us? In the language case the question of latent content is even more urgent, and more perplexing, in that an original founding of language by overt convention is not merely unhistorical but unthinkable. What is convention when there can be no thought of convening?

Some philosophers have placed a heavy burden upon a purported distinction between truths that are analytic, these being true purely by linguistic convention, and the synthetic truths that say something substantial about reality. This is a characteristic and crucial case of appealing to convention where there can have been no thought of convening. For the philosophers in question count logical truth analytic; and here a circularity would arise if we were to take the conventions explicitly. The predicament is that in order to apply any explicit conventions that were general enough to afford all logical truth, we would already have to use logic in reasoning from the general conventions to the individual applications.

We have before us a study, both lucid and imaginative, both amusing and meticulous, in which Lewis undertakes to render the notion of convention independent of any fact or fiction of convening. He undertakes to isolate the distinguishing traits of conventionality, the latent content, without benefit of simile or make-believe. Very roughly, the keynote of conventionality is a certain indifference: the syllable “big” could have meant “small” for all we care, and the red light could have meant “go,” and black ties could have been counted less formal than fancy ones. Such is the initial intuition; but the appropriate sense of indifference, or of “could have meant,” needs a lot of refining. It gets it, thanks to Lewis’ deft use, among other things, of the latter-day theory of games and decisions.

The problem of distinguishing between analytic and synthetic truths was apparently one motive of the study. In the end, Lewis concludes that the notion of convention is not the crux of this distinction. He does not for this reason find the analyticity notion unacceptable, however. He ends up rather where some began, resting the notion of analyticity on the notion of possible worlds. His contentment with this disposition of the analyticity problem makes one wonder, after all, how it culd have been much of a motive for his study of convention; but we may be thankful for whatever motives he had. For in the course of the book the reader comes to appreciate convention, not analyticity, as a key concept in the philosophy of language.

W. V. Quine

Harvard University

September 26, 1968

I

Coordination and Convention

1. Sample Coordination Problems

Use of language belongs to a class of situations with a conspicuous common character: situations I shall call coordination problems. I postpone a definition until we have seen a few examples. We begin with situations that might arise between two people—call them “you” and “I.”

(1) Suppose you and I both want to meet each other. We will meet if and only if we go to the same place. It matters little to either of us where (within limits) he goes if he meets the other there; and it matters little to either of us where he goes if he fails to meet the other there. We must each choose where to go. The best place for me to go is the place where you will go, so I try to figure out where you will go and to go there myself. You do the same. Each chooses according to his expectation of the other’s choice. If either succeeds, so does the other; the outcome is one we both desired.

(2) Suppose you and I are talking on the telephone and we are unexpectedly cut off after three minutes. We both want the connection restored immediately, which it will be if and only if one of us calls back while the other waits. It matters little to either of us whether he is the one to call back or the one to wait. We must each choose whether to call back, each according to his expectation of the other’s choice, in order to call back if and only if the other waits.

(3) An example from Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature: Suppose you and I are rowing a boat together. If we row in rhythm, the boat goes smoothly forward; otherwise the boat goes slowly and erratically, we waste effort, and we risk hitting things. We are always choosing whether to row faster or slower; it matters little to either of us at what rate we row, provided we row in rhythm. So each is constantly adjusting his rate to match the rate he expects the other to maintain.