Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Semantic analyses for dyadic deontic logic
- 2 A problem about permission
- 3 Reply to McMichael
- 4 Why ain'cha rich?
- 5 Desire as belief
- 6 Desire as belief II
- 7 Dispositional theories of value
- 8 The trap's dilemma
- 9 Evil for freedom's sake?
- 10 Do we believe in penal substitution?
- 11 Convention: Reply to Jamieson
- 12 Meaning without use: Reply to Hawthorne
- 13 Illusory innocence?
- 14 Mill and Milquetoast
- 15 Academic appointments: Why ignore the advantage of being right?
- 16 Devil's bargains and the real world
- 17 Buy like a MADman, use like a NUT
- 18 The punishment that leaves something to chance
- 19 Scriven on human unpredictability (with Jane S. Richardson)
- Index
11 - Convention: Reply to Jamieson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Semantic analyses for dyadic deontic logic
- 2 A problem about permission
- 3 Reply to McMichael
- 4 Why ain'cha rich?
- 5 Desire as belief
- 6 Desire as belief II
- 7 Dispositional theories of value
- 8 The trap's dilemma
- 9 Evil for freedom's sake?
- 10 Do we believe in penal substitution?
- 11 Convention: Reply to Jamieson
- 12 Meaning without use: Reply to Hawthorne
- 13 Illusory innocence?
- 14 Mill and Milquetoast
- 15 Academic appointments: Why ignore the advantage of being right?
- 16 Devil's bargains and the real world
- 17 Buy like a MADman, use like a NUT
- 18 The punishment that leaves something to chance
- 19 Scriven on human unpredictability (with Jane S. Richardson)
- Index
Summary
Jamieson produces nine examples. Eight are said to be conventions according to our common, established concept of convention but not according to my analysis thereof in Convention. The ninth is said to be clearly not a convention according to our common concept, but an unsettled case under my analysis. Since Jamieson proposes no rival analysis, the best way of proceeding will be to respond to his examples one by one. Some I judge to be simply mistaken, either about our common concept or about my analysis. In considering these examples we will do well to bear in mind three things: (1) that we may be guided by preferences and expectations to which we give no conscious thought; (2) that under my analysis conventionality is relative to a population; and (3) that conditional preferences must be distinguished from conditionals about preferences. Others of Jamieson's examples are more instructive, and do exhibit genuine usages that do not fall under my analysis. I think these might best be regarded as derivative usages, related in familiar ways to the central concept given by my analysis; not as evidence for a revised analysis of the central concept, and not as evidence for different and unrelated senses of the word “convention.” Thus I gladly concede that we may properly call something a convention, although it does not meet the defining conditions I gave, because we hope that it will come to meet them, or we wish that it did, or we contemplate the possibility that it might have, or we believe that it used to, or we pay lip service to the fiction that it does.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy , pp. 136 - 144Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999