David Lewis
Midcentury philosopher who thought a lot about conventions and created a convention theory. Contemporary of Saul Kripke. Anticipated the notion of zero-knowledge proofs.
Per Lewis,
conventions are regularities in action that solve co-ordination problems.
in other words, they are ways to exploit the environment to establish common knowledge between speakers; and you can then build upon the common knowledge to expand the convention, i.e. write a language to speak. See parikhKnowledgeBasedSemantics2003for an implementation, and builder-assistant language for the Wittgensteinian seeds of the idea.
Lewis has a quite specific logical account, detailed in the SEP ref (section 2.3 last I read), about how conventions can be updated. I'm interested at some point in comparing this approach to the protocol updating mechanism described by Parikh.
- Convention http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/#2 2.1 Analyses of Convention http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/#2.1 2.2 Conventions of Language http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/#2.2 2.3 Later Revisions http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/david-lewis/#2.3