How inductive inferences can be grounded on salience alone: some reflections on the emergence of conventions

Conventions fall into the domains of both philosophy and economics. In the study of convention, the interplay of the two disciplines has proved to be productive. As its practitioners often acknowledge, many of the key ideas in the modern theory of convention were first proposed by David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40/ 1978). Although Hume‟s Treatise is now usually classified as one of the great works of philosophy, it can also be read as an investigation in cognitive psychology which (among many other achievements) lays the foundations for an empirically-grounded form of decision theory. 1