Inherent and probabilistic naturalness

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...

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Veröffentlicht in:Philosophical studies 2024-03, Vol.181 (2-3), p.369-385
1. Verfasser: Gasparri, Luca
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Education
Epistemology
Ethics
Humanities and Social Sciences
Metaphysics
Philosophy
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Mind
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description 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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subjects Education
Epistemology
Ethics
Humanities and Social Sciences
Metaphysics
Philosophy
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Mind
title Inherent and probabilistic naturalness
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