ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a metasemantic proposal that draws on Lewis’ ideas about linguistic conventions, while rejecting the idealizations connected to his conception of language as cooperative information exchange. The chapter presents a conventionalist metasemantic proposal which characterizes meaning-determining use as a way of directing attention, rather than exchanging information. According to this proposal, linguistic conventions may be solutions to multiple strategy problems, including—but not limited to—communication. Various subsets of the community coordinate for the purpose of achieving a variety of goals such as communication, establishing/maintaining social identity, and establishing/maintaining power. The games of interdependent decision making that constitute public language use are not necessarily cooperative, but can fall anywhere along a scale between pure collaboration and pure conflict. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which this picture overcomes the problems identified in Lewis’ account in Chapter 2.
