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Convention: Reply to Jamieson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David Lewis
David Lewis*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Type
Reply
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 1976 , pp. 113 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1976

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References

1 Convention: A Philosophical Study (Harvard University Press, 1969)Google Scholar. Jamieson's article is in Vol. V, no. 1 (Sept. 1975) of this journal.

2 There is one important revision that is desirable on other grounds, but has no bearing on the cases considered by Jamieson. I have adopted it, at Jonathan Bennett's suggestion, in “Languages and Language,” in Keith Gunderson, ed. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume VII (University of Minnesota Press, 1975).

3 This is not to say that all users of any one system comprise a population in which there is a convention to use that system. I share Jamieson's suspicion that most philosophers lack the conditional preferences for conformity that my analysis ascribes to participants in a convention. I would guess that the sub-populations of philosophers in which there are established quotation conventions might be quite small.

4 A die will be thrown; I stand to win $2 if the 6 is up, $1 if the 5 is up, and nothing otherwise. I suppose the die to be fair and care only about the money I may win, so my preferences follow the computable expected payoffs. X holds iff a 2 or 6 is up, Y iff a 1 or 5 or 6 is up, and Z iff a 3, 4, 5, or 6 is up. I prefer X to Y conditionally on Z, but I prefer the conditional Z ⊃ Y to the conditional Z ⊃ X.