Signs and Signalling

Abstract

The first three chapters of Lewis (1969) are concerned with conventions in general. In his fourth chapter he turns to a particular class of conventions — those in virtue of which, he claims, certain actions take on the status of signals. Lewis thinks that it is not helpful to begin the analysis of signalling from the observation that actions become signals when we endow them with meanings, for such a move would rely too heavily on our prior, tacit understanding of communication by conventional signalling. The task is to make that understanding more explicit: “So let us describe the phenomenon in other terms and leave meaning to look after itself” (Lewis, 1969, p. 122).