Concept
Convention (norm)
Overview
A convention influences a set of agreed, stipulated, or generally accepted standards, social norms, or other criteria, often taking the form of a custom.
In physical sciences, numerical values (such as constants, quantities, or scales of measurement) are called conventional if they do not represent a measured property of nature, but originate in a convention, for example an average of many measurements, agreed between the scientists working with these values.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
This convention is not of the nature of a promise: For even promises themselves, as we shall see afterwards, arise from human conventions. It is only a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
Names Convention several times; states what Convention is.
And the explanation of this is custom or agreement: we have made a convention that the rho shall mean s and a convention may indicate by the unlike as well as by the like. How could there be names for all the numbers unless you allow that convention is used? Imitation is a poor thing, and has to be supplemented by convention, which is another poor thing; although I agree with you in thinking that the most perfect…
Plato, Cratylus
Names Convention several times; states what Convention is.
If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executory power are its creatures.
Edmund Burke, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 03
Names Convention several times; opens on Convention.
Philosophers who discussed Convention (norm)
Related ideas
- David Kalupahana
- Nonviolence
- Sociology
- Law
- Birth control
- Middle Way
- Donald Davidson (philosopher)
- Symbolic interactionism
- Willard Van Orman Quine
- Society
- David Lewis (philosopher)
- Discourse
- Michel Foucault
- Discrimination
- Ruth Millikan
- Profanity
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.