Miscellaneous Thoughts from David Lewis's Convention
"forceful promising is a way of getting rid of coordination problems, not a way of solving them." -- p. 35
Mere analogy does not serve to pick out a coordination equilibrium:
"In fact, there are always innumerable alternative analogies... Every coordination equilibrium in our new problem (every other combination, too) corresponds uniquely to what we did before under some analogy, shares some distinctive description with it alone." -- pp. 37-38
Social life depends on inductive inferences:
"Coordinaiton by precedent... [is the] achievement of coordination by means of shared acquaintance with a regularity governing the achievement of coordination in a class of past cases which bear some conspicuous analogy to one another and to our present coordination problem. Our acquaintance with this regularity comes from our experience with some of its instances..." -- p. 41
A convention does not have to be the best convention to survive, only better than no convention:
"Different coordination equilibria do not have to be equally good -- only good enough so that everyone is ready to do his part if the others do." -- p. 50
Mere analogy does not serve to pick out a coordination equilibrium:
"In fact, there are always innumerable alternative analogies... Every coordination equilibrium in our new problem (every other combination, too) corresponds uniquely to what we did before under some analogy, shares some distinctive description with it alone." -- pp. 37-38
Social life depends on inductive inferences:
"Coordinaiton by precedent... [is the] achievement of coordination by means of shared acquaintance with a regularity governing the achievement of coordination in a class of past cases which bear some conspicuous analogy to one another and to our present coordination problem. Our acquaintance with this regularity comes from our experience with some of its instances..." -- p. 41
A convention does not have to be the best convention to survive, only better than no convention:
"Different coordination equilibria do not have to be equally good -- only good enough so that everyone is ready to do his part if the others do." -- p. 50
Comments
Post a Comment