Convention,correlation and consistency

Philosophical Studies - Peter Vanderschraaf’s Strategic Justice provides a defense of the egalitarian bargaining solution. Vanderschraaf’s discussion of the egalitarian solution invokes...     

Knowledge, Equilibrium and Convention

There are two general classes of social conventions: conventions of coordination, and conventions of partial conflict. In coordination problems, the interests of the agents coincide, while in partial conflict problems, some agents stand to gain only if other agents unilaterally make certain sacrifices. Lewis' (1969) pathbreaking analysis of convention in terms of game theory focuses on coordination problems, and cannot accommodate partial conflict problems. In this paper, I propose a new game-theoretic definition of convention which generalizes previous game-theoretic definitions (Lewis 1969, Vanderschraaf 1995), and which can be used to characterize norms of justice in partial conflict situations. I argue that the key structural property necessary for a social arrangement to be a convention is that it be conditionally self-enforcing, in the sense that: (i) each agent has a decisive reason to follow her end of the arrangement given that she expects all to do likewise, (ii) given a different set of expectations, some agents would have had a decisive reason to deviate, and (iii) these facts are common knowledge. This leads to a definition of convention as a strict correlated equilibrium (Aumann 1974) together with appropriate common knowledge conditions. Examples are given in which it is shown how this more general account of convention can be used to analyze norms of justice as well as coordination problems. It is only 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 for my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He is sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this common sense of interest is mutually express'd, and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behavior. And this may properly be call'd a convention or agreement betwixt us,... David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature And so it goes — we're here because we're here because we're here because we're here. Once the process gets started, we have a metastable self-perpetuating system of preferences, expectations, and actions capable of persisting indefinitely. As long as uniform conformity is a coordination equilibrium, so that each wants to conform conditionally upon coordination by the others, conforming action produces expectation of conforming action and expectation of conforming action produces conforming action. This is the phenomenon I call convention. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Social Convention Revisited

This article will compare and contrast two very different accounts of convention: the game-theoretical account of Lewis in Convention, and the account initially proposed by Margaret Gilbert (the present author) in chapter six of On Social Facts, and further elaborated here. Gilbert’s account is not a variant of Lewis’s. It was arrived at in part as the result of a detailed critique of Lewis’s account in relation to a central everyday concept of a social convention. An account of convention need not be judged by that standard. Perhaps it reveals the nature of an important phenomenon. Looked at in that light, these very different accounts are not incompatible. Indeed, neither should be ignored if one is seeking to understand the way in which human beings arrive at some degree of social order.     

约定的真理

一门科学,其发展的程度愈低,它的术语就愈倾向于建立在一种未加批判的假定之上.这个假定是指:人们可以相互理解这些术语.     

Silencing without Convention

Silencing is usually explained in terms of conventionalism about the nature of speech acts. More recently, theorists have tried to develop intentionalist theories of the phenomenon. I argue, however, that if intentionalists are to accommodate the conventionalists' main insight, namely, that silencing can be so extreme as to render certain types of speech act completely unavailable to victims, they must take two assumptions on board. First, it must be possible that speakers' communicative intentions are opaque to the speakers themselves. Second, it needs to be assumed that structural oppression can have hidden psychological effects on its victims. Because both assumptions can be motivated independently, I argue that silencing can be fully understood without appealing to linguistic conventions.     

Convention in joint activity

Conventional behaviors develop from practice for regularly occurring problems of coordination within a community of actors. Reusing and extending conventional methods for coordinating behavior is the task of everyday reasoning .
The computational model presented in the paper details the emergence of convention in circumstances where there is no ruling body of knowledge developed by prior generations of actors within the community to guide behavior. The framework we assume combines social theories of cognition with human information processing models that have been developed within Cognitive Science. The model presented reflects both elements of the framework. Conventional behaviors are partially coded in the predisposition of participants in a joint activity to expect certain points of coordination to develop during the course of the activity. The expected points of coordination that are commonly assumed form a design for an activity . Because of uncertainty, interruptions, and numerous other opportunities to get off-track and out-of-synch, the participants must work jointly and continuously to achieve conventional coordination.
One feature of the model is that the community improves its performance despite the fact that individual actors reason independently about their experiences. Another important feature of the model is that the mechanisms for improving behavior are tied to the memory function of individual actors. A third important feature is that the social interaction among the participants simplifies and drives the everyday reasoning processes. An analysis of a large set of computational experiments supports the theoretical position that is developed regarding everyday reasoning and convention.