Although Belgian diplomats analysed the nazi-regime from the very first moment as intrinsically crimina!, inhuman, dictatorial and revenge seeking, they showed the nazis in 1934-1935 that dialogue was possible. The nazi-diplomacy, with secrecy as a keystone, permitted some of the most important Belgian politicians and businessmen to meet the.nazi-leaders without being disapproved by public opinion or even parliament. This resulted in a «practical» way to improve political and above all economical relations between Belgium and nazi-Germany. It can be seen as (...) a Belgian answer to the inability of France and Great Britain to force the Third Reich to respect the international security treaties which were to guarantee the sovereignty of Belgium. (shrink)

The amount of information conveyed by linguistic conventions depends on their precision, yet the codes that humans and other animals use to communicate are quite ambiguous: they may map several vague meanings to the same symbol. How does semantic precision evolve, and what are the constraints that limit it? We address this question using a multiplayer gaming app, where individuals communicate with one another in a scaled-up referential game. Here, the goal is for a sender to use black and (...) white symbols to communicate colors. We expected that the players’ mappings between symbols and colors would grow more specific over time, through a selection process whereby precise mappings are preferentially copied. We found that players become increasingly more precise in their use of symbols over the course of their interactions. This trend did not, however, result from selective copying of precise mappings. We explore the implications of this result for the study of lexical ambiguity, Zipf's Law of Meaning, and disagreements over semantic conventions. (shrink)

One common objection to Conventionalism about modality is that since it is contingent what our conventions are, the modal facts themselves will thereby be contingent. A standard reply is that Conventionalists can accept this, if they reject the S4 axiom, that what is possibly possible is possible. I first argue that this reply is inadequate, but then continue to argue that it is not needed, because the Conventionalist need not concede that the contingency of our conventions has any (...) bearing on the modal status of necessary truths. It is explained why this does not compromise the Conventionalist claim that necessity – and particularly, essence – is due to conventions. (shrink)

This article surveys the main philosophical and formal ideas revolving around language as being conventional from the perspective of game theory. For very basic situations, this leads to a coherent view of conventions that offers interesting insights. Although there exist many open problems, this article will argue by outlining partial solution attempts that there is no principled reason for not applying methods from game theory to them.

This article considers Henri Poincaré’s conventionalism in historical context by comparing his use of such terms as “convention” and “conventional” with Charles Renouvier’s. As Renouvier was very influential in late nineteenth-century France, this comparison can provide some insight into how the terms were understood at the time. Renouvier was a political philosopher as well as a philosopher of science. He drew an analogy between the conventions or social contracts that govern society at large and the conventions that governed (...) communities of researchers in mathematics and the sciences. Both kinds of conventions were living contracts for Renouvier, subject to revision and change. What emerges from the comparison is an interpretation of Poincaré’s conventionalism that belies the view that it is a rigid, unbending philosophy holding back scientific progress. Rather, it is one according to which scientists come together to form a temporary consensus about particular starting points in order to make research into nature possible yet retain the liberty to try something new when the old set of assumptions no longer proves fruitful. (shrink)

_ Convention_ was immediately recognized as a major contribution to the subject and its significance has remained undiminished since its first publication in 1969. Lewis analyzes social conventions as regularities in the resolution of recurring coordination problems-situations characterized by interdependent decision processes in which common interests are at stake. Conventions are contrasted with other kinds of regularity, and conventions governing systems of communication are given special attention.

La pensée conventionnaliste de l’environnement se heurte à un problème central : l’absence d’un ordre de grandeur écologiste qui obéisse à la même grammaire que les six autres. Cet article propose une piste afin de surmonter ce problème. Il s’agit d’envisager l’écologisme, non plus sous le modèle idéal de la cité, mais comme une critique du capitalisme. Dans cette perspective, les fondements théoriques et l’effectivité historique de la critique écologiste du capitalisme sont étudiés. Codes JEL : B5, N5, O13, O440, (...) P10, Q5. (shrink)

Designers’ intentions are important for determining an artifact’s proper function (i.e., its perceived real function). However, there are disagreements regarding why. In one view, people reason causally about artifacts’ functional outcomes, and designers’ intended functions become important to the extent that they allow inferring outcomes. In another view, people use knowledge of designers’ intentions to determine proper functions, but this is unrelated to causal reasoning, having perhaps to do with intentional or social forms of reasoning (e.g., authority). Regarding these latter (...) social factors, researchers have proposed that designers’ intentions operate through a mechanism akin to social conventions, and that therefore both are determinants of proper function. In the current work, participants learned about an object’s creation, about social conventions for its use and about a specific episode where the artifact was used. The function implemented by the user could be aligned with the designer’s intended function, the social convention, both, or neither (i.e., an opportunistic use). Importantly, the use episode always resulted in an accident. Data show that the accident negatively affected proper function judgments and perceived efficiency for conventional and opportunistic functions, but not for designers’ intended functions. This is inconsistent with the view that designers’ intentions are conceptualized as causes of functional outcomes and with the idea that designers’ intentions and social conventions operate through a common mechanism. (shrink)

It is widely thought that what finally characterizes American literary narratives is a preoccupation with Americanness. If the "great theme" of European fiction has been "man's life in society," Walter Allen writes in The Modern Novel, "the great theme of American fiction has been the exploration of what it means to be an American." The best American film narratives also seem to bear out this proposition, especially those of the great American naturals like Griffith and Ford and Hawks, and most (...) especially Orson Welles' Citizen Kane , regarded by many as the greatest American film. Welles' film belongs to that category of narratives which take a prominent figure from contemporary American life and use him to stand for what are conceived to be representative traits of the collective American character. Understandably, then, there are many general resemblances in the film to other well-known stories of American entrepreneurs, magnates, and tycoons. Long before the flourishing of tycoon biographies in the American sound film, well before F. Scott Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser, before even Henry James, certain conventions and associations had become well established in stories of this type. The up-and-coming young American was shrewd and practical, an image of compulsive energy, a man with his eye always on the future. His Americanness also consisted of such traits as enterprise, indomitable idealism, a certain naturalness and openness to experience, and a relentless will to succeed. His geographical origin could be made to carry moral force, and he or another character who equated American commercial noblesse oblige with universal morality could be a useful thematic touchstone. Robert L. Carringer is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches and writes on film, American literature, and interdisciplinary approaches to literature. This study is the first in a series of essays in progress on American films and American narrative tradition. He has also contributed "The Scripts of Citizen Kane" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

The aim of this comment is to discuss tentatively one way of understanding, for the study of legal phenomena, some of the implications of recognising the existence of peculiar entities which Celano calls pre-conventions. This comment speculates that, if Celano is right, then so-called paradigm cases of law lose some of their philosophical centrality. To study pre-conventions, one needs to collect accounts of situations in which relevant agents use criteria for identifying legal phenomena that only approximate valid sources (...) of law. To provide such accounts, the traditional informational focus of a philosophical analysis of law also needs, this comment further speculates, substantial broadening: if pre-conventions are in the body, then that is where we need to look if we want to study them. (shrink)

Inspired by my reading of the conclusions of Plato’s Cratylus, in which I suggest that Socrates endorses the claim that speaker’s intentions determine meaning of their utterances, this thesis investigates a modern parallel. Drawing on observations that people who produce an utterances that do not accord with the conventions of their linguistic community can often nevertheless communicate successfully, Donald Davidson concludes that it is the legitimate intentions of speakers to be interpreted in a particular way that determine the meanings (...) of their utterances. This thesis investigates how we might interpret the non-standard utterances of another from the perspective of Davidson’s anticonventionalist picture of language. It proceeds by investigating the possible roles for radical interpretation and triangulation in explaining successful day-to-day communication, where non-standard language use abounds, and argues that - even from a Davidsonian perspective - a full account of the linguistic skills and knowledge that a language user requires to interpret utterances must ultimately appeal at least to regularities word use and expressions, if not full-blown conventions. (shrink)

La pensée conventionnaliste de l’environnement se heurte à un problème central : l’absence d’un ordre de grandeur écologiste qui obéisse à la même grammaire que les six autres. Cet article propose une piste afin de surmonter ce problème. Il s’agit d’envisager l’écologisme, non plus sous le modèle idéal de la cité, mais comme une critique du capitalisme. Dans cette perspective, les fondements théoriques et l’effectivité historique de la critique écologiste du capitalisme sont étudiés. Codes JEL : B5, N5, O13, O440, (...) P10, Q5. (shrink)

Donald Davidson denied convention any interesting role in the philosophical theory of meaning: Conventions are neither necessary nor sufficient to account for communication by language. This anticonventionalism is part of Davidson's more general individualism about meaning. According to Davidson, notions such as that of a shared language, shared practices of use, and the attendant notions of standard meaning and linguistic mistake, are as uninteresting to the philosophical theory of meaning as that of convention. The chapter starts with a sketch (...) of the meaning theoretical background for Davidson's anticonventionalism, arguing that Davidson ultimately motivates both anti‐conventionalism and individualism by the social or public nature of language. After quickly taking up Davidson's arguments against attempts to conventionally link semantics to nonsemantic purposes, the chapter then focuses on his attack on the idea that literal meaning is conventional meaning and the surrounding discussion. (shrink)

There is a standard skeptical concern within philosophy of art that causal explanations in psychology and neuroscience apply equally to our engagement with art that is done well and art that is done poorly and so do not contribute to our understanding of the normative dimension of artistic appreciation. This skeptical concern is often used to challenge the relevance of psychology and neuroscience to our understanding of art. I sketch a crossmodal model for perception which demonstrates that those affective processes (...) responsible for encoding the biological and instrumental value of a stimulus play a critical productive role in perceptual processing. I argue that the ensuing model for affective perception dissolves these skeptical philosophical concerns. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

Many societies have norms of equity – that those who make symmetric social contributions deserve symmetric rewards. Despite this, there are widespread patterns of social inequity, especially along gender and racial lines. It is often the case that members of certain social groups receive greater rewards per contribution than others. In this article, we draw on evolutionary game theory to show that the emergence of this sort of convention is far from surprising. In simple cultural evolutionary models, inequity is much (...) more likely to emerge than equity, despite the presence of stable, equitable outcomes that groups might instead learn. As we outline, social groups provide a way to break symmetry between actors in determining both contribution and reward in joint projects. (shrink)

There is a lack of research about the political strategies used by firms in emerging countries, mainly because the literature often assumes that Western-oriented corporate political activity has universal application. Drawing on resource-dependency logics, we explore why and how firms orchestrate CPA in the institutionally challenging context of Nigeria. Our findings show that firms deploy four context-fitting but ethically suspect political strategies: affective, financial, pseudo-attribution and kinship strategies. We leverage this understanding to contribute to CPA in emerging countries by arguing (...) that corporate political strategies are shaped by the reciprocity and duality of dependency relationships between firms and politicians, and also by advancing that these strategies reflect institutional weaknesses and unique industry-level opportunities. Importantly, we shed light on the muttered dark side of CPA. We develop a CPA framework and discuss the research, practical and policy implications of our findings. (shrink)

This paper discusses six formalization techniques, of varying strengths, for extending a formal system based on traditional mathematical logic. The purpose of these formalization techniques is to simulate the introduction of new syntactic constructs, along with associated semantics for them. We show that certain techniques (among the six) subsume others. To illustrate sharpness, we also consider a selection of constructs and show which techniques can and cannot be used to introduce them. The six studied techniques were selected on the basis (...) of actual practice in logic and computing. They do not form an exhaustive list. (shrink)

Social conventions are those arbitrary rules and norms governing the countless behaviors all of us engage in every day without necessarily thinking about them, from shaking hands when greeting someone to driving on the right side of the road. In this book, Andrei Marmor offers a pathbreaking and comprehensive philosophical analysis of conventions and the roles they play in social life and practical reason, and in doing so challenges the dominant view of social conventions first laid out (...) by David Lewis. Marmor begins by giving a general account of the nature of conventions, explaining the differences between coordinative and constitutive conventions and between deep and surface conventions. He then applies this analysis to explain how conventions work in language, morality, and law. Marmor clearly demonstrates that many important semantic and pragmatic aspects of language assumed by many theorists to be conventional are in fact not, and that the role of conventions in the moral domain is surprisingly complex, playing mostly an auxiliary and supportive role. Importantly, he casts new light on the conventional foundations of law, arguing that the distinction between deep and surface conventions can be used to answer the prevalent objections to legal conventionalism. Social Conventions is a much-needed reappraisal of the nature of the rules that regulate virtually every aspect of human conduct. (shrink)

Poincaré’s conventionalism has been interpreted in many writings as a philosophical position emerged by reflection on certain scientific problems, such as the applicability of geometry to physical space or the status of certain scientific principles. In this paper I would like to consider conventionalism as a philosophical position that emerged from Poincaré’s scientific practice. But not so much from dealing with scientific problems, as from the use of two specific methodologies proper to modern mathematics and the modern natural sciences: methodological (...) structuralism and the hypothetical-deductive method—thus, as a philosophical position which emerged from a way (or rather, two ways) ofdoingscience. With this approach, I try to deepen the analysis of connections between Poincaré’s scientific practice and his philosophy. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom has it that truth is always evaluated using our actual linguistic conventions, even when considering counterfactual scenarios in which different conventions are adopted. This principle has been invoked in a number of philosophical arguments, including Kripke’s defense of the necessity of identity and Lewy’s objection to modal conventionalism. But it is false. It fails in the presence of what Einheuser (2006) calls c-monsters, or convention-shifting expressions (on analogy with Kaplan’s monsters, or context-shifting expressions). We show that (...) c-monsters naturally arise in contexts, such as metalinguistic negotiations, where speakers entertain alternative conventions. We develop an expressivist theory—inspired by Barker (2002) and MacFarlane (2016) on vague predications and Einheuser (2006) on counterconventionals—to model these shifts in convention. Using this framework, we reassess the philosophical arguments that invoked the conventional wisdom. (shrink)

As reflexões metodológicas de Poincaré sobre a modelação mecânica dos fenômenos, as teorias físicas, a hierarquização das leis e a evolução do seu estatuto e sistema são susceptíveis de uma leitura kantiana que exibe a função constitutiva das matemáticas e a função reguladora dos princípios de conveniência e dos princípios da física, correspondendo estes a uma importante etapa na evolução das teorias físicas. The methodological reflections of Poincaré on the mechanical modeling of phenomena, physical theories, the hierarchy of laws and (...) the evolution of their status and system are illuminated by a Kantian reading that displays the constitutive function of mathematics and the regulative function of principles of convenience and of the principles of physics, these corresponding to an important step in the evolution of physical theories. (shrink)

Comment on Joseph Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility.