Inherent and probabilistic naturalness.
Standard accounts hold that regularities of behavior must be arbitrary to constitute a convention. Yet, there is growing consensus that conventionality is a graded phenomenon, and that conventions can be more or less natural. I develop an account of natural conventions that distinguishes two basic d...
| Publicado en: | Philosophical Studies Vol. 181; no. 2/3; pp. 369 - 386 |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Artículo |
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Springer Nature
Mar2024
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| Sumario: | Standard accounts hold that regularities of behavior must be arbitrary to constitute a convention. Yet, there is growing consensus that conventionality is a graded phenomenon, and that conventions can be more or less natural. I develop an account of natural conventions that distinguishes two basic dimensions of conventional naturalness: a probabilistic dimension and an inherent one. A convention is probabilistically natural if it is likely to emerge in a population of agents, and inherently natural if its content is a regularity that scores high on relevant measures for naturalness. I motivate the proposal on conceptual grounds and then showcase its descriptive benefits by discussing two case studies in language: the tendency towards word-length optimality and the prevalence of shape opacity in spoken language vocabularies. |
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