Social Conventions: From Language to Law: From Language to Law

Princeton University Press (2009)
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Abstract

Social conventions are those arbitrary rules and norms governing the countless behaviors all of us engage in every day without necessarily thinking about them, from shaking hands when greeting someone to driving on the right side of the road. In this book, Andrei Marmor offers a pathbreaking and comprehensive philosophical analysis of conventions and the roles they play in social life and practical reason, and in doing so challenges the dominant view of social conventions first laid out by David Lewis. Marmor begins by giving a general account of the nature of conventions, explaining the differences between coordinative and constitutive conventions and between deep and surface conventions. He then applies this analysis to explain how conventions work in language, morality, and law. Marmor clearly demonstrates that many important semantic and pragmatic aspects of language assumed by many theorists to be conventional are in fact not, and that the role of conventions in the moral domain is surprisingly complex, playing mostly an auxiliary and supportive role. Importantly, he casts new light on the conventional foundations of law, arguing that the distinction between deep and surface conventions can be used to answer the prevalent objections to legal conventionalism. Social Conventions is a much-needed reappraisal of the nature of the rules that regulate virtually every aspect of human conduct.

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Index.Andrei Marmor - 2009 - In Social Conventions: From Language to Law: From Language to Law. Princeton University Press. pp. 183-186.

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Andrei Marmor
Cornell University

Citations of this work

Regulative Rules: A Distinctive Normative Kind.Reiland Indrek - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (3):772-791.
Social Ontology.Brian Epstein - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Constitutive Rules: Games, Language, and Assertion.Indrek Reiland - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (1):136-159.
A unified social ontology.Francesco Guala & Frank Hindriks - 2015 - Philosophical Quarterly 65 (259):177-201.
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology.Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.) - 2016 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

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