Abstract
The thesis of this essay is that social conventions of the kind Lewis modeled are generated and maintained by a form of practical reasoning which is essentially common. This thesis is defended indirectly by arguing for an interpretation of the role of salience in Lewis’s account of conventions. The remarkable ability of people to identify salient options and appreciate their practical significance in contexts of social interaction, it is argued, is best explained in terms of their exercise of what I call “salience reasoning,” a form of common practical reasoning. The more widely accepted understanding of salience competence, the “natural salience” understanding, fails as an interpretation of the notion at work in Lewis and Schelling (on whom Lewis relied) and is inadequate as an explanation of salience competence.
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Notes
I develop here a thought I first broached in Postema (1998) and in a different context in Postema (1995). Sugden (1986, 1998b) and Hollis and Sugden (1993) suggested the idea to me and references throughout this essay testify to the fact that I continue to learn from Sudgen’s work. A substantial portion of this paper was written while I was a Fellow at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center. I am very grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for the opportunity to work out these ideas in a setting of extraordinary beauty and to the staff of the Bellagio Center for their grace and hospitality.
By “norm,” I have in mind that which is expressible in a normative proposition. In social science literature, the term is used more narrowly to refer to what I here call “practiced social norms.”
I speak here of game theory as Lewis thought and made use of it. In recent years, these assumptions have been relaxed in many ways, and game theory has been put to many other uses.
This explanation of conventions is broader than Lewis’s account in three respects. (1) It does not restrict conventions to solving pure coordination problems. (2) It regards conventions as correlated rather than Nash equilibria. (3) It does not require that the convention be instantiated in an already established regularity of behavior; such regularities may focus the expectations on a unique scheme of actions that enables parties to achieve cooperation, but they are not essential for this purpose. Any publicly available rule or pattern that designates roles or actions for the parties and focuses their expectations will suffice; it need not have already been practiced. See below Sect. 7.
A more sophisticated third-order salience reasoner would take into account the likelihood that some of her opponents might choose on the basis of primary and some on the basis of secondary salience; moreover, she will take into account that the secondary-salience reasoners among her opponents may make different estimates of primary salience for their opponents (including her); and she will predict her opponents’ choices based on this more complex probability assessment.
Those who model second- and higher-order salience reasoning typically assume common inductive assessments, but this creates a hybrid of the natural salience and the public salience models. If the plausibility of the natural salience model depends in part on this assumption, then it is not an alternative to the public salience model, but a special case of it.
Could not Alice choose on the basis of what is (commonly known to be) the options most likely to have primary salience for the population generally, while at the same time expecting Bob to do the same? Yes, but that would amount to Alice and Bob choosing strategies based on the shared rule: choose that option which is most likely to be primarily salient to population P. This, too, presupposes public salience.
Once the basic distinction between singular and plural perspectives is clearly in mind we can recognize that it is relative and not restricted to the pair human individual and groups of human individuals.
I analyze and defend this conception of common practical reasoning fully in “Common Reason” (in draft), which builds on and revises Postema (1995). It parallels in several respects work of Sugden (1993; 2000; Gold and Sugden 2007) and Bacharach (2006), but also departs in significant respects from their work. Since the aim of this essay is to illuminate an important part of Lewis’s theory of conventions, this is not the place to develop fully my account of common reasoning or to detail and defend its departures from these other notable accounts.
Bacharach (2006) may recognize the possibility of ephemeral teams, but he assumes even they will be antecedently committed to common goals.
Determination of the existence and scope or membership of the relevant group for parties facing interaction is, fundamentally a practical matter for the parties involved. It is not settled a priori by any metaphysical determinants, neither is it always, or even typically, settled by prior sociological or psychological facts (i.e., ascriptive identities—like race, gender, ethnicity, etc.—or tendencies of persons to psychologically “identify with” certain other people), although, of course, these may contribute to group recognition.
Since common reasoning need not be restricted to instrumental reasoning, the rational unity or “sense making” involved can take many forms, discursive or non-discursive, and it need not be verbalized (or verbalizable). The rational-holist sense making in jazz, discussed below, follows a specific musical-aesthetic, rather than instrumental or discursive, logic.
The above three conditions are, with some variation, included in most accounts of plural or team reasoning. The following three conditions are not, except that Gold and Sugden (2007) attempt to address the fifth condition.
This can involve not only making a relatively abstract plan more determinate, but also adjusting sub-plans and even the “master plan” to the moves or actions of others (sometimes in execution, sometimes in violation, of the plan or sub-plan), and supporting the efforts of other parties to conceive and execute their “parts”.
Musical significance, necessarily, is holistic (Postema 2004), but holistic thinking in music is not necessarily common; it is conceivable that the combination of strictly individual musical efforts might produce a musically significant product, but it would be entirely by accident. Ensemble jazz playing may achieve some kind of musical significance by accident, but insofar is it is intentional, it will be a common product, product of common musical thinking. This is what Berliner describes.
My aim is not entirely to supplant the natural salience hypothesis, at least in its more sophisticated versions, but rather to propose the public salience hypothesis as a viable alternative hypothesis and in many contexts the better explanation of the ability of people to detect and act on salience in real-life instances of social interaction.
Of course, what is “best” under the circumstances may still be Pareto sub-optimal (or sub-optimal by other measures) when considered under more ideal conditions. It is even possible that what is sub-optimal relative to other options may be salient, for that very reason, its sub-optimality being the only thing that uniquely picks out one among a number of equilibria. “Best” is always relative to the range of options (that is scheme or arrangements of actions) that are sufficiently public and so potentially salient. Some options may not be available in this way. Conventions are often sub-optimal relative to any number of ideal standards, but they have practical force (when they do), even for parties that work within a common reasoning framework, because the ideal options are not publicly available, or uncertain enough to succumb to assurance problems.
Bardsley et al. (2006). The studies reported by Bardsley et al. appear to be contradictory—Dutch students in Amsterdam do better on the public salience approach, but English students in Nottingham do better on the sophisticated natural salience approach.
See Pettit’s contrast between intentional and discursive subjects (Pettit 2001, pp. 104–110).
Of course, common-framework reasoning is not always eligible or rationally warranted for parties engaged in social interaction. However, discussion of the conditions of eligibility and reasonableness of common reasoning must be saved for another occasion.
The Bloods and the Crips in Los Angeles, despite their often deadly competition, needed to find a way publicly to mark their difference, one that members of both groups and members of the general public could recognize. They faced a problem of “coordinated divergence” (Heath et al. 2006).
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Postema, G.J. Salience Reasoning. Topoi 27, 41–55 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-008-9031-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-008-9031-6