Social conventions are those arbitrary rules and norms governing the countless behaviors all of us engage in every day without necessarily thinking about them, from shaking hands when greeting someone to driving on the right side of the road. In this book, Andrei Marmor offers a pathbreaking and comprehensive philosophical analysis of conventions and the roles they play in social life and practical reason, and in doing so challenges the dominant view of social conventions first laid out by David Lewis. Marmor begins by giving a general account of the nature of conventions, explaining the differences between coordinative and constitutive conventions and between deep and surface conventions. He then applies this analysis to explain how conventions work in language, morality, and law. Marmor clearly demonstrates that many important semantic and pragmatic aspects of language assumed by many theorists to be conventional are in fact not, and that the role of conventions in the moral domain is surprisingly complex, playing mostly an auxiliary and supportive role. Importantly, he casts new light on the conventional foundations of law, arguing that the distinction between deep and surface conventions can be used to answer the prevalent objections to legal conventionalism. "Social Conventions" is a much-needed reappraisal of the nature of the rules that regulate virtually every aspect of human conduct.

安德瑞·馬默（Andrei Marmor），美國南加州大學古爾德法學院法學教授、哲學教授，法學與哲學研究中心主任。英國牛津大學法學博士，師從拉茲。在法律道德性與政治學之間的關係問題上著述頗豐，除《社會慣習》（Social Conventions，普林斯頓大學齣版社2009年版）之外，還著有《解釋與法律理論》（Interpretation and Legal Theory，牛津大學齣版社1992年初版，哈特齣版社2005年第2版），《實在法與客觀價值》（Positive law & Objective Values）（牛津大學齣版社2001年版），《多元主義時代的法律》（Law in the Age of Pluralis，牛津大學齣版社2007年版），《法哲學》（Philosophy of Law，普林斯頓大學齣版社2011年版）及大量學術論文。