Work Classification Layer
Compare Works
Pick two or more works to set their attribute fingerprints, dimension-by-dimension passages, and shared school embodiments side by side. Especially useful for author-stage comparisons (Wittgenstein early vs late) and for setting a single tradition's foundational texts against each other.
Convention: A Philosophical Study
A convention is a stable solution to a coordination problem — and the conventions of language are not arbitrary but rationally selected for mutual benefit
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | Convention: A Philosophical Study (Early (Lewis's first book, published at 28, the year he began at UCLA)) |
|---|---|
| Time · Extent | Infinite |
| Time · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Time · Grain | Continuous |
| Time · Freedom | Non-Deterministic |
| Time · Traversability | Linear |
| Time · Dimensionality | One |
| Time · Direction | Uni-directional |
| Space · Extent | Infinite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Infinite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Local |
| Observer · Time Instance | Single |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Mediated |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Partial |
| Observer · Physicality | Embodied |
| Observer · Agency | Active |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | None |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Reason |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Infinite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Relational |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Non-conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Discrete |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
Convention: A Philosophical Study
The temporal stability of conventions — they emerge through repeated interactions and persist because deviation is locally costly.
Space
Convention: A Philosophical Study
The population (P) as the social space within which the convention holds — Lewis's analysis is explicit that conventions are population-relative.
Matter
Convention: A Philosophical Study
The embodied agents whose coordination problems give rise to conventions.
Observer
Convention: A Philosophical Study
The rational agent whose first-order conformity and higher-order expectations together constitute the convention.
Energy
Convention: A Philosophical Study
The strategic energies of rational coordination — the costs of deviation, the benefits of conformity, the convergence on equilibrium.
Information
Convention: A Philosophical Study
Common knowledge as the information-theoretic precondition of convention — every agent knows the regularity, knows that others know it, knows that others know that they know it, ad infinitum.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
The "common knowledge" condition (every agent knows R, every agent knows that every agent knows R, etc., to arbitrary depth) has been challenged as too strong by Schiffer and others, who developed weaker "mutual belief" alternatives. Whether the analysis really avoids Quine's scepticism (or merely pushes it back to questions about how populations come to share common knowledge in the first place) remains contested. The game-theoretic framework was generative — it shaped Grice, Stalnaker, Brandom — but later work by Searle and Brandom argued conventions involve normative-deontic elements that the rational-choice analysis underweights.