This paper proposes a new interpretation of non-cooperative games that shows why the unilateralism of best-reply reasoning fails to capture the mutuality of strategic interdependence. Drawing on an intersubjective approach to theorizing individual agency in shared context, including a non-individualistic model of common belief without infinite regress, the paper develops a general model of a 2 × 2 simultaneous one-shot non-cooperative game and applies it to games including Hi-Lo, Stag Hunt, Prisoners’ Dilemma, Chicken, BoS and Matching Pennies. Results include High (...) as the rational choice in Hi-Lo, and Cooperate as a possible rational choice in the Prisoners’ Dilemma. (shrink)

Conventions are regularities in social behaviour of the past that enable us to coordinate our actions. Some conventions are lawlike: they are expected to be observed always or nearly always. However, in order to coordinate our actions, it may suffice that a precedent has occurred often enough, and sometimes even a single precedent will do. So, in general, conventions merely enable us to solve our coordination problems; lawlike conventions are a special case. Grammatical conventions are often lawlike; sense conventions are (...) typically enabling. In order to resolve the indeterminacies that sense conventions give rise to, interlocutors must rely on the common ground. In this and other ways, common ground is a prerequisite for convention‐based communication. (shrink)

This paper examines the perceptual and reasoning processes that underpin regularities in behaviour. A distinction is made between situations as they are, or as described by an omniscient external observer, and situations as agents see or frame them. Different frames can stem from differences in culture, experience and personality, as well as from other context-specific factors. Drawing upon David Lewis’sConvention(1969), I show that consistency between reasoning and experience does not preclude individuals from understanding the same state of affairs differently, and (...) that agents’ beliefs about others’ beliefs may well be wrong. As a result, cases may occur in which conventions are sustained by false but mutually consistent and self-confirming beliefs. (shrink)

Can commitments be generated without promises, commissive speech acts or gestures that are conventionally interpreted as such? While we remain neutral with respect to the normative answer to this question, we propose a psychological answer. Specifically, we hypothesize that people at least believe that commitments are in place if one agent (the sender) has led a second agent (the recipient) to rely on her to do something, and if this is mutually known by the two agents. Crucially, this situation can (...) occur even if the sender has neither uttered a commissive speech act nor performed any action that would conventionally be interpreted as such. In a series of online experiments, we tested this hypothesis by presenting participants with vignettes describing everyday situations in which a recipient’s expectations were frustrated by the sender’s behavior, and then eliciting moral judgments about the sender’s actions and character. We manipulated whether the recipient’s reliance on the sender was mutually known, and if so, whether the sender verbally acknowledged this or not. The results show that moral judgments differed significantly according to whether the recipient’s reliance was mutually known, but not according to whether this was verbally acknowledged. (shrink)

Common knowledge is ubiquitous in our lives and yet there remains considerable uncertainty about how to model or understand it. Standard analyses of common knowledge end up being challenged by either regress or circularity which then give rise to well-known paradoxes of practical reasoning, such as the Two Generals’ Paradox. This paper argues that the nature and utility of common knowledge can be illuminated by appeal to Wittgenstein’s Hinge Epistemology. It is argued that those things that we standardly think of (...) as being common knowledge in our lives are the same as those that Wittgenstein identified as hinge certainties. This identification of common knowledge with hinge certainties allows us to resolve the regress problem for common knowledge and explain how the Two Generals’ Paradox arises. (shrink)