ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines Lewis’ conventionalist metasemantic project and identifies three interrelated idealizations that flow from his conception of language as a mechanism for cooperative information exchange: 1) The regularity in action constituting public language use is taken to be information exchange; 2) The sole (or, at least, the predominant) function of public language is taken to be that of solving the strategy problem of communication; 3) Public language is taken to be rooted in common interests. The chapter discusses several ways in which these idealizations prove to be problematic. First, by taking the relevant regularity in action involved in linguistic conventions to be information exchange, Lewis’ account delivers the wrong modal predictions. Second, empirical data concerning language change is incompatible with Lewis’ claims that linguistic conventions are characterized by a predominance of common interests and that they are solutions to a single strategy problem—namely, communication.
