Authority and Convention

Language, Categorization, and Convention

Linguistic meaning is a convention. This article investigates how such conventions can arise for color categories in populations of simulated “agents.” The method uses concepts from evolutionary game theory: A language game where agents assign names to color patches is played repeatedly by members of a population. The evolutionary dynamics employed make minimal assumptions about agents’ percept...

Knowledge and Convention

This paper investigates the epistemic assumptions that David Lewis makes in his account of social conventions. In particular, I focus on the assumption that the agents have common knowledge of the convention to which they are parties. While evolutionary analyses show that the common knowledge assumption is unnecessary in certain classes of games, Lewis’ original account (and, more recently, Cub...

Common Knowledge and Convention

This paper investigates the epistemic assumptions that David Lewis makes in his account of social conventions. In particular, I focus on the assumption that the agents have common knowledge of the convention to which they are parties. While evolutionary analyses show that the common knowledge assumption is unnecessary in certain classes of games, Lewis’ original account (and, more recently, Cub...

Convention and Exemplars

Beyond convention

A lthough copper-oxide superconductors share with conventional superconductors the remarkable property of offering no resistance to the flow of electricity, their characteristic critical temperatures (Tc) below which this happens can be as high as 135 K. In fact, these materials belong to the emerging class of so-called strongly correlated systems — a class of materials whose list is rapidly gr...