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. This study contributes to that appreciation and to rearticulates 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. Another 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.

David K. Lewis 于 1969 年发表了他出色的博士论文，  Convention；哲学研究。有一段滞后，大卫休谟的学术研究已经开始阐述刘易斯和休谟在惯例上的相似之处。沿着刘易斯的路线阅读休谟为我们提供了一个词汇，我们可以用它更好地欣赏和阐明休谟的约定理论的创新性。这项研究有助于理解并重新阐明休谟的创新分析框架，用于思考非正规的责任和义务——有时被伪装成制度或文化——潜在的社会互动和经济行为。在总结刘易斯之后，我们用广义的刘易斯术语来处理休谟对语言、正义和政治权威的约定出现的描述。另一个目的是利用休谟发展“自然公约”的概念。自然约定是一种社会实践，其具体的时间和地点形式在刘易斯意义上是约定俗成的，但其广义形式对于更高级的社会组织来说是必要的，因此是自然的。在论文的最后一部分，我们考虑了休谟公约谈话的语义独创性。从大规模的文本搜索中，我们发现很少有证据表明，在休谟之前，英语单词“convention”是在刘易斯意义上使用的——也就是说，在某种意义上不涉及字面召集。