Daniel B. Klein’s research while affiliated with George Mason University and other places

David K. Lewis published his brilliant PhD dissertation in 1969, Convention; A Philosophical Study. With a lag, scholarship on David Hume has come to elaborate the similitude between Lewis and Hume on convention. Reading Hume along the lines of Lewis gives us a vocabulary with which we can better appreciate and articulate the innovativeness of Hume’s theory of convention. The main purpose of this study is both to contribute to that appreciation and to rearticulate Hume’s innovative analytical framework for thinking about the unformalized duties and obligations—sometimes glossed as institutions or culture—underlying social interaction and economic behavior. After summarizing Lewis, we treat Hume’s account of the emergence of the conventions of language, justice, and political authority in broadly Lewisian terms. A second purpose is to draw on Hume to develop a concept of “natural convention.” A natural convention is a social practice whose concrete form in time and place is conventional in a Lewisian sense, but whose generalized form is necessary, and hence natural, for more advanced social organization. In the final section of the paper, we consider the semantic originality of Hume’s convention talk. Drawing from a largescale textual search, we find scant evidence that the English word “convention” was used in a Lewisian sense—that is, in a sense that did not entail a literal convening—prior to Hume.

Prompted by Emily Chamlee-Wright’s fine essay “Self-censorship and Associational Life in the Liberal Academy” (the symposium lead essay), I present a scheme that focuses on something that might not seem to fit Emily’s focus on self-censorship. But after presenting my Scheme I will suggest that it does. My scheme focuses on the wrestling we engage in to alter the composite character of the communities we belong to. It turns out that one of the dimensions of dissimilitude within the community, a dimension to some extent beyond politics, is liberal arts affirmation versus solidaric political affirmation.

Ostension is the act or process of showing, as in showing a child a fossil while saying “fossil.” Here collected are 59 quotations about language, discourse, ostension, and semantics. A theme is the “facts are theory-laden” spiral between language and discourse, between explananda and explanation – the philosophy-of-science problem (and the pervasive political problem) of justifying our judgment in favor of one over against another outlook. The collection highlights individual personage – and hence history, or historicity – as conditioning the content of a theory (or the complex that spans explanandum and explanation). The individual personage infuses meaning into words or signs in showing his own doings including speech acts (discourse, parole). Multiple quotations are authored by Thomas Kuhn, J.G.A. Pocock, Karl Kraus, Adam Smith, Josep Pieper, Friedrich Hayek, Oliver Wendall Holmes, Sr., Otto Jespersen, Iain McGilchrist, and Steven Mithen. A single quotation is authored by John Milton, Edmund Burke, Gershom Carmichael, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Søren Kierkegaard, Kenneth Burke, Michael Polanyi, Thomas Schelling, Wayne Booth, and William Graham Sumner.

We ambitiously reexamine Smith’s moral theory in relation to Hume’s. We regard Smith's developments as glorious and important. We also see them as quite fully agreeable to Hume, as enhancement, not departure. But Smith represents matters otherwise! Why would Smith overstate disagreement with his best friend? One aspect of Smith’s enhancement, an aspect he makes very conspicuous, is that between moral approval and beneficialness (‘utility’ in Smith) there is another phase, namely, the moral judge's sense of propriety. With that phase now finding formulation, Smith, if only implicitly, generates a spiral of beneficialness and propriety, a spiral shown in Figure 7 in the present paper. We consider Figure 7, illustrating the spiral, to be the most important arrival point in the present paper; it highlights the non-foundationalism of Smith's ethics. But to arrive at the spiral, we must engage in extensive exegesis. In Part IV of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith presents a foil against which he develops his own theory, a foil supposedly representing Hume. According to the foil, moral approval derives from ‘utility.’ But, in multiple ways, the foil is misleading. We provide an interpretation of Hume, notably his four-factor account of moral approval, before examining Smith's representation of Hume. One twist is that Smith used the words utility and useful differently than Hume did – Smith quietly stretched them to include species of agreeableness, thereby obscuring the importance of agreeableness in Hume’s theory. Another, more significant problem is that Smith allows the impression that in Hume moral approval derives quite determinately from beneficialness. In fact Hume conveys the interpretive and sentimental spaciousness of the operations that generate moral approval; here, Hume even speaks repeatedly of ‘proper sentiments’, thus almost using the term propriety himself. But the propriety phase in Smith opens up to a key facet of Smith’s development on Hume: He poeticizes a locus of sympathy not emphasized in Hume – namely, that between the moral judge and her own man within the breast; that locus enters the theory in addition to the sympathies emphasized in Hume, not in lieu of them. We distinguish lateral sympathy, which is important in Hume’s thought, and vertical sympathy, which is especially characteristic of Smith’s more inner-directed and allegorical thought. Smith embraces Hume’s lateral sympathy and enhances moral theory by adding formulations (‘the man within the breast’, ‘the impartial spectator’) that elaborate vertical sympathy. Next, we come to something of a twist in the whole matter: We show that – as Smith well knew all along! – propriety is a species of agreeableness! Smith’s propriety phase represents another dimension within which such agreeableness lives: Smith’s vertical dimension thus gives rise to a spiral representing the diachronic development of the judge herself. It is a spiral of beneficialness and propriety: Each propriety phase in the next loop of the spiral engenders a species of agreeableness now as a part of beneficialness. Smith's developments on Hume, then, involve the following three facets: (1) formulation of the propriety phase; (2) the poetic elaboration of vertical sympathy; (3) the diachronic spiral of propriety and beneficialness. The three facets come together, especially in Ed. 6 of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The whole development goes beyond Hume, but, really, is agreeable to Hume – though Smith himself portrays his developments as disagreeing with features of Hume's moral theory. We speculate that Smith was more or less aware of all that that we say, including the absense of any really substantive disagreement. Why, in that case, would Smith have proceeded as he did? We address that question at the end of the piece. Our speculations suggest a method in the madness.

Jordan Peterson says that postmodernists say no interpretation is better than another. I would no sooner identify Peterson’s adversaries as those who have been misled by “postmodernism” than I would identify them as misled by “sustainability,” “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” or “intersectionality.” Such fare is mainly symptomatic. “Postmodern” invocations are often like “sustainability” invocations: inessential. This piece is not a defense of postmodernism. It is a critique of PoMo-bashing. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

The name Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783–1847) is little known outside of Sweden, but the volume Freedom in Sweden: Selected Works of Erik Gustaf Geijer (Geijer 2017) translates choice works and presents Geijer to modern readers. In this essay we provide an introduction to Geijer (pronounced yay-yer). We raise the question of whether his declaring, in 1838, in dramatic fashion, for liberalism was an ideological migration or a coming out of the closet. We discuss the scope and flavor of his discourse, and suggest that he belongs in the company of moral philosophers and historians of civilization such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Alexis de Tocqueville. We highlight his essay “An Economic Dream,” which prefigured Hayek’s likening of the price system to an allegory of society-spanning communication and intelligence.