Abstract
David Lewis’s account of conventions has received substantial criticism over the years, but one aspect of it has been less controversial and thus has been retained in various forms by other authors: his requirement that members of a group in which a convention obtains must know that they and others conform. I argue that knowledge of conformity requirements wrongly exclude certain paradigmatic conventions, including some central semantic conventions. Ruth Garrett Millikan’s account of conventions accommodates these cases, but it is marred by her (as I argue) mistaken claim that most linguistic conventions involve coordination, and by complications with her central notion of reproduction. Aiming to build upon Millikan’s insights while avoiding her account’s problems, I contend that doing A is conventional in groups in which there is widespread, interconnected copying of doing A as a way of doing something further, B, where there are other equally good and accessible ways to do B.
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Notes
Lewis (1969/2002,1975) does require both of these other kinds of knowledge, in addition to knowledge of conformity (pp. 61, pp. 5–6). But these other requirements, unlike his more minimal knowledge of conformity requirement, have already received considerable criticism, such as from some of the authors cited in note 1.
Margaret Gilbert (1989) provides a compelling criticism of this line of reasoning (pp. 330–338). But at this stage we are concerned just with what motivated Lewis, so I won’t criticize his view on these grounds.
In fact, it seems that Gilbert (1989) requires not just individual, but common knowledge (pp. 203, 373). I will leave this detail aside, as my concerns about Gilbert’s knowledge requirement apply, a fortiori, to a version requiring common knowledge.
Wayne Davis (2003) objects to Lewis in a similar manner, providing some other kinds of examples of linguistic conventions without knowledge of conformity (pp. 210, 227).
Millikan (2005) offers the example of standing distances (i.e., the amount of space people maintain between themselves and nearby others) (p. 5). I do not list that example because empirical investigation has left the question of whether standing distances are conventional quite uncertain (Hayduk, 1983; Sorokowska et al., 2017).
This claim may seem odd with respect to Marmor (2009), given that he says that semantics is by and large not conventional (p. 83). But, he does make it clear (in the passage cited in the main text) that he takes the sound-sense connection to be conventional, and that is our focus here.
For instance, Marmor (2009) exemplifies the second horn of the dilemma when he says that his ‘davka’ case (which is quite similar to our examples of semantic conventions) involves implicit “knowledge-how” that satisfies his requirement of knowledge of one’s own conformity (pp. 67–70).
Lewis’s (1975) condition (2), along with the application of condition (6) to conditions (2)–(5), is likely to continue to wrongly exclude the examples of conventions we’ve discussed (and of course, as noted at the outset, there are other problems with Lewis’s account). Similarly, Miller’s (2001) key notions of joint action and collective ends make reference to additional mutual true beliefs that are likely to bring similar problems (pp. 59, 266). In Marmor’s (2009) case, that conventions are rules requiring knowledge of one’s own conformity seems like too deep and central a feature of his account to simply excise. Similarly, for Gilbert (1989), it is difficult to imagine how a group could issue a fiat to itself without members having some awareness that this has occurred.
See Guala, 2020 for an argument that coordination actually works better, in at least some circumstances, when people do not think about each other’s thoughts.
Millikan (2005) makes a similar point (pp. 56–57). Moore (2013) suggests that chimpanzees must be thinking to themselves “[Effect] E can be achieved in [situation] S,” whereas humans think, “Performing A in S is a way of doing E,” implying that this kind of copying cannot be unconscious (p. 498). However, I see no reason to assume that humans or chimpanzees must think anything in particular while imitating others, especially given the examples of unconscious direct copying provided above.
Although our propensity to copy others’ actions sets us apart from other primates, it does not set us apart from all other animals. For example, there is evidence that prairie dogs may have copied, conventional languages (Devitt, 2021, pp. 33–34). I do not mention this phenomenon in the main text because prairie dogs are not close evolutionary relatives of ours, and so their inability to develop languages as complex as ours, even though they are able to copy, is not particularly mysterious. What does call out for explanation is the vast difference in the communicative abilities of humans among primates, given how similar we otherwise are. And humans’ ability to copy seems to be part of that explanation.
I should note that Davis (2003) offers an account of conventions that allows for some conventions without knowledge of conformity. He provides a list of mechanisms by which conventions are perpetuated, one of which (enculturation) hints at something akin to Millikan’s notion of reproduction, though without the depth in which she develops that notion and without portraying it as a unifying factor in all conventions. The rest of his mechanisms follow Lewis in presupposing or explicitly requiring knowledge of conformity (pp. 207–211).
Condition (2) is modeled on my Alternatives Condition for Conventions (Stotts, 2017, p. 880).
Millikan’s (1989) own account of functions pushes in a similar direction (p. 288).
One might wonder whether the ‘as a way of’ talk inadvertently reintroduces a knowledge of conformity requirement. Can I do something as a way of doing something else without being aware of what I’m doing? For a response to this worry, see Stotts, 2021. I’ll also note that my use of the ‘as a way of’ notion is indebted to Israel et al., 1993.
This way of dealing with the matter pushes me in the direction of semantic minimalism (Borg, 2004, 2012; Cappelen and Lepore, 2005). Developing that connection would take us too far afield, but I do want to acknowledge it. I also want to note that in addition to the subtle variation within a group at a single (span of) time that we have been discussing, similar variation can happen across time. The causal history strategy for values for A works equally well for variation across time. On the other hand, once the value for B at the group level has changed with the passage of time, my view is that the convention would then be changed. This is what happens when a word’s meaning shifts over time.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper, I am grateful to several anonymous referees, and to participants at the 2021 Linguistic Conventions Conference, the 2021 meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, and the Spring 2021 Language Online Workshop. I am also grateful to the students in my Winter 2021 graduate seminar at McMaster University for helpful discussion of many of the texts discussed in this paper. This paper is partially based on material from my dissertation, Conventions and Expression Meaning (University of California, Riverside, 2016).
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Stotts, M.H. Conventions without knowledge of conformity. Philos Stud 180, 2105–2127 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01957-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01957-z