Explanation
A convention is a rule stabilised through shared use that makes signs, expectations, and actions mutually coordinable. Its force rests neither solely on natural resemblance nor necessarily on an explicit agreement. People follow it because they expect others to do likewise and perceive departures as meaningful. Conventions reduce the burden of communication: not every meaning and procedure must be negotiated anew. Yet they can also make historically contingent arrangements appear natural and invisible. The concept therefore moves from repeated practice to shared expectation and then to the critical question of who can alter a rule and whom its apparent obviousness excludes.
Movement of thought
1. Several possible signs or courses of action are initially available in principle. 2. A community repeatedly uses and expects one particular assignment or procedure. 3. Mutual expectation stabilises the rule and reduces the cost of each new coordination. 4. A counter-test asks whether the pattern reflects natural necessity, private habit, or genuine shared convention. 5. The rule returns as a changeable social achievement whose benefits and exclusions become visible.
Scientific use case
Pragmatics, semiotics, and institutional research can study the emergence, observance, and change of shared rules. Experiments can test how rapidly coordination conventions form and respond to deviation.
Example
A group consistently marks text passages awaiting review in yellow. Soon the colour alone coordinates caution and the next work step without requiring a fresh explanation.
Counterexample
Heavy objects falling is not a convention but a physical regularity. A private habit likewise becomes conventional only when mutual social expectations sustain it.
Distinction
Distinguish convention from natural law, norm, ritual, individual usage, and explicit agreement. Convention rests on shared expectation; a norm may additionally claim moral or legal obligation.
Effect on thought and perception
Conventions create reliability and common legibility, reduce negotiation, and may also stabilise historical power relations as apparently self-evident.
Resonance
One action is repeated and answered by many; through feedback a rule emerges that prefigures how later actions will be understood.
Cite this entry
Reich, Michael (Hrsg./ed.): „Convention“. Atlas der Sprache, AT-W3-0412. ATLAS 260, data model 1.6.0. https://atlasoflanguage.com/concept/AT-W3-0412The address remains stable; editorial content may evolve. Editorial reading state: 2026-10-15. Include your access date for precise references.
Historical background
A revealing tension in Locke’s account is that words are voluntarily attached to ideas, yet an individual cannot simply decree how everyone else will use them. In Book III, chapter ii, he appeals to common use and tacit consent to explain this public constraint. These are conceptual witnesses for linguistic convention, not an attestation that the modern profile’s full theoretical meaning was already contained in a single word convention. The argument separates the absence of a necessary natural bond from the absence of social regularity. Once a practice is shared, departing from it has consequences for intelligibility, even if the practice could have developed otherwise. The Atlas can therefore use this passage to resist a common confusion: conventional does not mean that each participant may change the rule without coordination. Locke’s model remains centred on communicating ideas and should not be silently equated with later accounts of conventions as coordination solutions or institutional rules. Those developments, and the English term’s earlier senses, need separate historical evidence.
How conceptual history changes the analysis
Conventional means socially stabilised, not freely replaceable by each individual.
References for the historical section
- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (first published with the date 1690), Books III–IV; Gutenberg transcription identified as based on the second edition · III.ii.8, voluntary imposition, common use and tacit consent
Selected original-English passages read; not collated against first-edition page images. Modern profile labels are explicitly distinguished from the terminology used by Locke. His account of ideas is a historical philosophical position, not a verified contemporary model of language or cognition.