Convention

Author: David Lewis
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118695771
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
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.

Convention: a Philosophical Study

Author: David K. Lewis
Publisher: Cambridge : Harvard University Press
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
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. This book is of central importance to philosophers, linguists, social scientists, legal theorists, and anyone interested in the role of convention in the function of social behavior and language.

Convention, Translation, and Understanding

Author: Robert Feleppa
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438402538
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
This book surveys several theoretical controversies in anthropology that revolve around reconciling the objective description of culture with the influence of inquirer interests and conceptions. It relates them to discussions by followers of W.V. Quine who see the problems of anthropological inquiry as indicative of conceptual problems in the basic assumptions operative in the discipline, and in the study of language in general. Feleppa offers a revised view of the nature and function of translation in anthropology that gives a plausible account of the problems that traditional semantics introduces into anthropology, while avoiding the severe methodological import Quine envisions.

Counterfactuals

Author: David Lewis
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118696417
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Book Description
Counterfactuals is David Lewis' forceful presentation of and sustained argument for a particular view about propositions which express contrary to fact conditionals, including his famous defense of realism about possible worlds.

Imagination and Convention

Author: Ernest LePore
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198717180
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
How do hearers manage to understand speakers? And how do speakers manage to shape hearers' understanding? Lepore and Stone show that standard views about the workings of semantics and pragmatics are unsatisfactory. They advance an alternative view which better captures what is going on in linguistic communication.

Conventionalism

Author: Yemima Ben-Menahem
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107320410
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
The daring idea that convention - human decision - lies at the root both of necessary truths and much of empirical science reverberates through twentieth-century philosophy, constituting a revolution comparable to Kant's Copernican revolution. This book provides a comprehensive study of Conventionalism. Drawing a distinction between two conventionalist theses, the under-determination of science by empirical fact, and the linguistic account of necessity, Yemima Ben-Menahem traces the evolution of both ideas to their origins in Poincaré's geometric conventionalism. She argues that the radical extrapolations of Poincaré's ideas by later thinkers, including Wittgenstein, Quine, and Carnap, eventually led to the decline of conventionalism. This book provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century philosophy. Many of the major themes of contemporary philosophy emerge in this book as arising from engagement with the challenge of conventionalism.

Convention

Author: David Kellogg Lewis
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631150794
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Book Description

The United Nations Genocide Convention

Author: Samuel Totten
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487524080
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
THE UNCG is a complicated piece of international law. This book, authored by two experts on the topic of genocide, enables readers to more accurately analyze these horrific events.

The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation

Author: Paul A. Roth
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810140896
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
In The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, Paul A. Roth resolves disputes persisting since the nineteenth century about the scientific status of history. He does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative, making their logic explicit, and revealing how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. Roth situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework and develops a nonrealist (irrealist) metaphysics and epistemology of history—arguing that there exists no one fixed past, but many pasts. The book includes a novel reading of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showing how it offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science. This book will be of interest to researchers in historiography, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology.

Social Conventions

Author: Andrei Marmor
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400831652
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
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.