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1. An exception to this trend is John Searle, who discusses money inThe Social Construction of Reality (1995). Searle analyzesmoney not through convention but rather through his proprietaryframework of constitutive rules.

2.Whether or notthey aretrue is another matter. Liam Murphy and Thomas Nageladvocate conventionalism about property inThe Myth ofOwnership (2002), a book whose title suggests that claims aboutproperty rights are, strictly speaking, false. In the body of the text,however, Murphy and Nagel seem to argue instead that claims aboutproperty rights aremade true by convention, which presumablyentails that such claims aretrue. A similar ambivalencesometimes seems to inform Hume’s exposition.

3.Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems seemed to many philosophersto undercut conventionalism about mathematics. Quine argued alongthese lines in “Carnap on Logical Truth.” When Carnaptries to specify a precise sense in which arithmetic is a“consequence” of a conventionally stipulated linguisticframework, the first incompleteness theorem forces him to employ ameta-language containing mathematics that goes beyond arithmetic (soas to ensure the bivalence of arithmetical truth). Quine argues thatthis meta-linguistic appeal renders Carnap’s procedure circular. In aposthumously published paper (1995), Gödel himself advances adifferent argument based on the second incompletenesstheorem. Briefly, Gödel argues that Carnap can treat arithmeticas fixed by convention only if he shows that the relevant conventiondoes not generate a contradiction. By the second incompletenesstheorem, we can show this only if we assume mathematics not capturedby the relevant convention. The need for that assumption undercuts theclaim that arithmetic results solely from convention. Michael Friedman(1999) presses both Gödelian objections. Warren Goldfarb andThomas Ricketts (1992) defend Carnap against such objections.

4.The logicalpositivists urged that Einsteinian relativity theory supports geometricconventionalism. For instance, Schlick (1917/1920) argued that generalrelativity treats all coordinate systems as equally admissible, andhence that we must arbitrarily choose a coordinate system, therebyconventionally fixing our metric geometry. Friedman (1983, 1999)forcefully maintains that such positivist arguments typically restedupon serious misunderstandings of general relativity. In particular,general relativity posits a determinate, non-conventional metric thatis related in a determinate way to the mass-energy distribution, asdescribed by Einstein’s field equations.

5.One ofLewis’s goals in developing his theory of linguistic conventionwas to rebut Quinean skepticism about analyticity. In this connection,he offered the following definition:

sentence \(s\) is analytic as used by members of a population\(G\) iff there is a language \(L\) such that \(L\) isthe language used by \(G\) and \(s\) is true in \(L\) in allpossible worlds,

where “language \(L\) is used by population\(G\)” is explicated in terms of Lewisian convention, asdescribed in section 7.1,Conventional theories of meaning. Lewis argues on the basis ofthis definition that Quine’s skepticism about analyticity isunwarranted. To this, Quine replies that Lewis has not broken out ofthe “intensional circle”, since he helps himself to thenotion of a possible world (1969). In our post-Kripkean era, mostphilosophers would doubtless urge that, at best, Lewis’sdefinition vindicates metaphysicalnecessity rather thananalyticity.

6.David Gauthier(1979) argues that Hume’s own theory of government is a speciesof “hypothetical contractarianism,” of the kind made famousby John Rawls.

7. Other notabledevelopments in the dynamical study of equilibrium selection include the “hypothesis testing”model, offered by Dean Foster and H. Peyton Young (2003), and the“regret testing” model, also offered by Foster and Young(2006).