{"agent_id":"lewis","agent_name":"David Lewis","slug":"convention-as-game-theoretic-coordination-and-language-as-tr","label":"Convention as game-theoretic coordination, and language as truthful-in-L and trust-in-L: are conventions sustained by mutual expectations rather than by agreement, and is a language the language of a population by virtue of such conventions?","topic":"Convention as game-theoretic coordination, and language as truthful-in-L and trust-in-L","question":"Are conventions sustained by mutual expectations rather than by agreement, and is a language the language of a population by virtue of such conventions?","position":"A regularity R in the behavior of a population P is a convention if and only if: (1) almost everyone conforms to R; (2) almost everyone expects almost everyone else to conform to R; (3) almost everyone prefers to conform to R on the condition that almost everyone else does; (4) almost everyone would prefer that almost everyone conform to some R' rather than to no regularity (so the regularity is sustaining itself by mutual expectation, not by force or coincidence); (5) the conditions just listed are matters of common knowledge in P; and (6) there is at least one alternative regularity R' that would have served almost as well and that would have been similarly stable had it arisen instead (the *arbitrariness* condition that distinguishes a convention from a forced response). This analysis treats conventions as solutions to coordination problems sustained by mutual expectations, without any requirement of explicit agreement or a moment of founding or any other historical fiction. The extension to language in \"Languages and Language\" (1975) treats a language L as a function from sentences in contexts to truth-conditions; a population uses L just in case there is in P a convention of *truthfulness in L* (one tries to utter sentences of L only when they are true-in-L-in-context) and *trust in L* (one expects others to be truthful in L, and on that basis relies on their utterances as evidence for what they believe to be true). The conventions of truthfulness and trust together explain what it is for a population to speak a given language — without invoking either an inner grasp of meaning or a public agreement that semantics somehow ratifies.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"A regularity R in the behavior of a population P is a convention if and only if: (1) almost everyone conforms to R; (2) almost everyone expects almost everyone else to conform to R; (3) almost everyone prefers to conform to R on the condition that almost everyone else does; (4) almost everyone would prefer that almost everyone conform to some R' rather than to no regularity (so the regularity is sustaining itself by mutual expectation, not by force or coincidence); (5) the conditions just listed are matters of common knowledge in P; and (6) there is at least one alternative regularity R' that would have served almost as well and that would have been similarly stable had it arisen instead (the *arbitrariness* condition that distinguishes a convention from a forced response).","n":[1,2,3]}],[{"t":"This analysis treats conventions as solutions to coordination problems sustained by mutual expectations, without any requirement of explicit agreement or a moment of founding or any other historical fiction.","n":[]},{"t":"The extension to language in \"Languages and Language\" (1975) treats a language L as a function from sentences in contexts to truth-conditions; a population uses L just in case there is in P a convention of *truthfulness in L* (one tries to utter sentences of L only when they are true-in-L-in-context) and *trust in L* (one expects others to be truthful in L, and on that basis relies on their utterances as evidence for what they believe to be true).","n":[4]}],[{"t":"The conventions of truthfulness and trust together explain what it is for a population to speak a given language — without invoking either an inner grasp of meaning or a public agreement that semantics somehow ratifies.","n":[5]}]],"texts":"Convention: A Philosophical Study (1969, Harvard, with Quine's foreword — the doctoral thesis and the founding work on conventions; reissued by Blackwell 2002); 'Languages and Language' (in Gunderson, ed., Language, Mind and Knowledge 1975, reprinted in Phil Papers Vol I) — the extension of the Convention framework to language as truthful-in-L and trust-in-L; 'Scorekeeping in a Language Game' (Journal of Philosophical Logic 1979, reprinted in Phil Papers Vol I) — the contextualist supplement; 'General Semantics' (Synthese 1970) and 'Index, Context, and Content' (1980a) for the formal semantic apparatus. Reception: Margaret Gilbert's On Social Facts (1989) and her subsequent work on plural subjects for the major alternative account of social ontology against Lewisian individualism; David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement (1986) for the bargaining-theoretic alternative; Michael Bratman's Faces of Intention (1999) and Shared Agency (2014) on shared intention; Robert Sugden's The Economics of Rights, Co-operation, and Welfare (1986) for the game-theoretic extension; H. P. Grice's Studies in the Way of Words (1989) for the parallel meaning-as-speaker-intention tradition; Andrei Marmor's Social Conventions (2009).","works":["Convention: A Philosophical Study (1969, Harvard, with Quine's foreword — the doctoral thesis and the founding work on conventions","reissued by Blackwell 2002)","'Languages and Language' (in Gunderson, ed., Language, Mind and Knowledge 1975, reprinted in Phil Papers Vol I) — the extension of the Convention framework to language as truthful-in-L and trust-in-L","'Scorekeeping in a Language Game' (Journal of Philosophical Logic 1979, reprinted in Phil Papers Vol I) — the contextualist supplement","'General Semantics' (Synthese 1970) and 'Index, Context, and Content' (1980a) for the formal semantic apparatus"],"reception":"Margaret Gilbert's On Social Facts (1989) and her subsequent work on plural subjects for the major alternative account of social ontology against Lewisian individualism; David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement (1986) for the bargaining-theoretic alternative; Michael Bratman's Faces of Intention (1999) and Shared Agency (2014) on shared intention; Robert Sugden's The Economics of Rights, Co-operation, and Welfare (1986) for the game-theoretic extension; H. P. Grice's Studies in the Way of Words (1989) for the parallel meaning-as-speaker-intention tradition; Andrei Marmor's Social Conventions (2009).","status":"Convention (1969) founded the contemporary philosophical literature on convention and remains the standard reference; the 1975 extension to language is the foundational Lewisian alternative to the Gricean speaker-meaning-first program and the Davidsonian radical- interpretation program. The principal contemporary alternatives are Margaret Gilbert's plural-subject account (On Social Facts 1989 and subsequent work), which holds that genuine social facts require joint commitment of a kind Lewisian mutual expectations cannot capture; Bratman's shared-intention framework; the Gricean speaker-meaning tradition; and the contemporary game- theoretic descendants in economics and political science (Sugden, Young, Skyrms). The common-knowledge condition has been weakened by Sillari, Vanderschraaf, and others on grounds that the iterated-knowledge requirement is too strong for the conventions ordinary speakers actually sustain.","era":"1941-2001","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Part 3: Philosophy of Language","page":"p. 165","canonical":"","quote":"More precisely: a regularity *R,* in action or in action and belief, is a *convention* > *Languages and Language* > *16$* in a population *P* if and only if, within *P,* the following six conditions hold. (Or at least they almost hold.","label":"Part 3: Philosophy of Language, p. 165"},{"n":2,"work":"Part 3: Philosophy of Language","page":"pp. 165–166","canonical":"","quote":"There is at least one alternative *R'* such that the belief that the others conformed to *R'* would give everyone a good and decisive practical or epistemic reason to conform to *R'* likewise; such that there is a general preference for general conformity to *R'* rather than slightly-less-than-general conformity to *R'∙,* and such that there is nor mally no way of conforming to *R* and *R'* both.","label":"Part 3: Philosophy of Language, pp. 165–166"},{"n":3,"work":"Part 3: Philosophy of Language","page":"pp. 168–169","canonical":"","quote":"Then the regularity of truthfulness and trust in £z is an alternative to the prevailing regularity of truthfulness and trust in £. For the alternative regularity, as for the actual one, general conformity by the others would give one a reason to conform; and general conformity would be gen erally preferred over slightly-less-than-general conformity.","label":"Part 3: Philosophy of Language, pp. 168–169"},{"n":4,"work":"Part 3: Philosophy of Language","page":"pp. 167–168","canonical":"","quote":"To be trusting in £ is to form beliefs in a certain way: to impute truthfulness in £ to others, and thus to tend to respond to another's utterance of any sentence of £ by coming to believe that the uttered sentence is true in £. 2This propsal is adapted from the theory given in Erik Stenius, \"Mood and Language-Game,\" *Synthese* 17 (1967): 254-74.","label":"Part 3: Philosophy of Language, pp. 167–168"},{"n":5,"work":"Part 3: Philosophy of Language","page":"pp. 169–170","canonical":"","quote":"It has a certain *meaning in P* if and only if it has that meaning in some language £ which is used in P. It is *true in P at* a world *w* if and only is it is true at *w* in some language £ which is used in P. It is *true in P* if and only if it is true in some language £ which is used in P.","label":"Part 3: Philosophy of Language, pp. 169–170"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"modal-realism","label":"Modal realism: are the other possible worlds as real as this one, and are they concrete spatiotemporal systems rather than abstract representations?"},{"slug":"humean-supervenience","label":"Humean supervenience: does everything contingent supervene on the mosaic of local particular matters of fact?"},{"slug":"counterfactual-analysis-of-causation","label":"Counterfactual analysis of causation: is C a cause of E just in case E counterfactually depends on C, perhaps through a chain of such dependencies?"},{"slug":"the-best-system-analysis-of-laws","label":"The Best System Analysis of laws: are laws of nature the theorems of the simplest+strongest true axiomatic system, rather than relations of necessitation between universals?"},{"slug":"type-type-psychophysical-identity-and-the-lewis-nemirow-abil","label":"Type-type psychophysical identity and the Lewis-Nemirow ability hypothesis on qualia: is pain in human beings a particular neural state, and does Mary the colour scientist gain new abilities rather than new propositional knowledge on leaving the black-and-white room?"}]}