On convention

Summary If my main criticism of Lewis is sound, we must conclude that there are at least two distinct types of convention: co-ordination conventions and conventions constituting autonomous practices. It is only possible in the case of the former, but not the latter, to specify the agents' structure of preferences, and the problem the convention is there to solve, antecedently and independently of the content of the conventions themselves. Conventions constituting an autonomous practice are constitutive of the point of, and the values inherent in the practice itself and hence they are not explicable in terms of solutions to co-ordination problems. Thus, from the vantage point of practical reasoning, Lewis' theory of conventions is partial and limited. It is superior, however, to the alternative offered by Gilbert, as it provides a good answer, albeit limited in scope, to the question of the normativity of conventions. Gilbert's analysis is more fundamentally flawed. She has failed to undermine Lewis' insight that conventions are arbitrary rules, due to her misconstrual of what arbitrariness consists in. Consequently, Gilbert's analysis of the normativity of social conventions in terms of joint acceptance is doubly inadequate: it fails to distinguish conventions from many other types of rule people follow, and it fails to answer the question of the normativity of conventions in terms of reasons for action.In the course of this discussion, I have side-stepped all the difficult questions concerning the conventionality of language, judging them to be far too complex issues to be dealt with within the confines of this article. I do hope, however, that an awareness of the distinction between co-ordination conventions and conventions of autonomous practices, will facilitate the arguments over the conventionality of language as well.I am indebted to Timothy Williamson and Joseph Raz with whom I have discussed these matters at length, and I am grateful for their invaluable comments on a draft of this paper. I am also indebted to Brian Bix, Ruth Gavison, Alon Harel, Edna Ullmann-Margalit, and the editors of Synthese for their helpful comments and suggestions.     

Linguistic convention and worldly fact

Philosophical Studies - Truth by convention, once thought to be the foundation of a uniquely promising approach to explaining our access to the truth in nonempirical domains, is nowadays widely...     

Morality,convention and conventional morality

Among anthropologists and sociologists, it is widely believed that moral rules are best understood as a type of social norm. Moral philosophers, however, have largely been hostile to this suggestion. In recent years, the impulse to distinguish moral rules from others types of social norm has received what many take to be empirical support from the work of Elliot Turiel and his collaborators, who have argued that there are two distinct “domains” of social cognition, the “moral” and the “conventional.” Many philosophers have taken this as proof that moral rules are fundamentally different from “conventional” social norms. I argue that moral philosophers should not be relying upon Turiel’s view to defend the moral/conventional distinction. First, I show that Turiel is claiming much less than many have taken him to be claiming, because he puts a lot of what philosophers have traditionally thought of as “morality” on the side of convention, or else in the broad region between the two that he refers to as “multidimensional contexts.” Second, I argue that his concept of the “conventional” is so narrow that the overwhelming majority of social norms – such as the standard rules of etiquette – wind up falling into the “multidimensional” category. This stems from his failure to distinguish between genuine conventions and what I refer to as “norms with conventional elements.”     

Correction to: Linguistic convention and worldly fact

Philosophical Studies - The original publication of the article contains two formatting errors, the second of which significantly inhibits readability.     

The identity of Guanyin: Religion,convention and subversion

This paper explores the visual representation of Guanyin (Avalokiteshvara) and argues that this, understood in relation to the traditions and devotion to him/her, allows her to be read as a figure of subversive religiosity. Indeed, it is argued that, rather than being a symbol of tradition and convention, a subversive reading of her is not only more potent, but also inherent within her portrayals. To begin, the transformation of him/her from a figure of mainstream Mahayana tradition, in the Pure Land School and texts such as the Lotus Sutra, to the ‘Chinese Goddess of Compassion’ is explored, paying particular attention to the legends of Miaoshan. This is then extended to consider both why he/she may be considered a conventional figure, but also how and why he/she offers the potential for subversive readings centred around ideas of gender, identity, patriarchy and morality.     

Linguistic authority and convention in a speech act analysis of pornography

Recently, several philosophers have recast feminist arguments against pornography in terms of Speech Act Theory. In particular, they have considered the ways in which the illocutionary force of pornographic speech serves to set the conventions of sexual discourse while simultaneously silencing the speech of women, especially during unwanted sexual encounters. Yet, this raises serious questions as to how pornographers could (i) be authorities in the language game of sex, and (ii) set the conventions for sexual discourse—questions which these speech act-theoretic arguments against pornography have thus far failed to adequately answer. I fill in this gap of the argumentation by demonstrating that there are fairly weak standards for who counts as an authority or convention-setter in sexual discourse. With this analysis of the underpinnings of a speech act analysis of pornography in mind, I discuss a range of possible objections. I conclude that (i) the endorsement of censorship by a speech act analysis of pornography competes with its commitment to the conventionality of speech acts, and, more damningly, that (ii), recasting anti-pornography arguments in terms of linguistic conventions risks an unwitting defence of a rapist's lack of mens rea—an intolerable result; and yet resisting this conclusion requires that one back away from the original claim to women's voices being ‘silenced’.     

The role of pictorial convention in haptic picture perception

An investigation of tactile picture perception is reported. Blindfolded sighted subjects explored either 'line drawings' or 'textured' tactile pictures produced on Zytex swell paper. All pictures were 'two-dimensional', that is they depicted only one object face and so did not represent a third dimension. Both picture sets represented the same objects. Results revealed that the textured pictures, in which solid surfaces of depicted objects were uniformly textured, were recognised more often than tactile line drawings, in which surfaces of objects were simply bounded by lines. There were no significant correlations between imagery ability (visual, cutaneous, or kinaesthetic) and picture recognition success. Texture may be a form of 'uniform connectedness' (Palmer and Rock 1994 Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 1 29-55) or 'common region' (Palmer 1992 Cognitive Psychology 24 436-447), highlighting the global characteristics of stimuli. We argue that textured pictures may encourage the haptic system to take a more globally oriented approach to tactile picture perception, benefiting recognition.     

Precis of Strategic justice: convention and problems of balancing divergent interests

Philosophical Studies -     

Invention and convention: Jewish and Christian critique of the Jewish fixed calendar

The institution of the Jewish fixed calendar has provoked muchcontroversial discussion not only among Jewish, but also Christian scholars. The significant contributions to the subject by two of the great sixteenth-century polymaths, the Jew Azariah de' Rossi and the Christian Sebastian Münster, pinpoint the delicate nature of calendrical investigation. Münster's frequent use of one particular piyyut (a religious poem) to undermine the basis of the Jewish fixed calendar is intended to defend the contradictory calendrical data in the Gospels. De' Rossi implicitly attacks Muenster for his recourse to this unhistorical text. Yet de' Rossi himself is intent on proving that the Jewish fixed calendar is a late post-talmudic convention, an iconoclastic approach which was not welcome in certain rabbinic circles. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Conversation and convention: Enduring influences on name choice for common objects

The name chosen for an object is influenced by both short-term history (e.g., speaker-addressee pacts) and long-term history (e.g., the language's naming pattern for the domain). But these influences must somehow be linked. We propose that names adopted through speaker-addressee collaboration have influences that carry beyond the original context. To test this hypothesis, we adapted the standard referential communication task. The first director of each matching session was a confederate who introduced one of two possible names for each object. The director role then rotated to naive participants. The participants later rated name preference for the introduced and alternative names for each object. They also rated object typicality or similarity to each named category. The name that was initially introduced influenced later name use and preference, even for participants who had not heard the name from the original director. Typicality and similarity showed lesser effects from the names originally introduced. Name associations built in one context appear to influence retrieval and use of names in other contexts, but they have reduced impact on nonlinguistic object knowledge. These results support the notion that stable conventions for object names within a linguistic community may arise from local interactions, and they demonstrate how different populations of speakers may come to have a shared understanding of objects' nonlinguistic properties but different naming patterns.