More Thoughts on David Lewis: Conventions and Semi-Conventions

By -
Following Lewis, we can say that in the US there is a convention to drive on the right, and in the UK on the left. But what should we call the situation that exists when walking in crowds? For I have noticed in each country that there is a tendency, albeit fairly weak, for pedestrians to follow the convention for automobiles: in the UK, pedestrians tend to shift leftward to avoid collisions, while in the US they tend to shift right.

What is the right way to characterize the above? Is it a convention at all -- a weak convention? -- or just the shadow cast by a genuine convention?

Comments

  1. PH10:24 PM

    I never noticed this at Oxford. Then again, I did get run over by a bicycle, so that shows you how observant I am.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous11:53 PM

      That's far easier than you let on, let me tell you.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more