  Tyler Burge (1975) develops a related but distinct worry. He agrees with Lewis that convention must have a conventional alternative, but he denies that participants must know of such an alternative. Burge offers as an example a primitive, isolated society with a single language. Members of this society believe, as a matter of religious principle, that theirs is the only possible language. Nevertheless, Burge argues, their linguistic practice is governed by convention. Burge concludes that Lewis adopts an overly “intellectualist” conception of convention, one that credits participants in convention with far more rational self-understanding than they necessarily possess. While Burge agrees with Lewis that conventions are arbitrary, he thinks that “the arbitrariness of conventions resides somehow in the ‘logic of the situation’ rather than in the participants’ psychological life” (p. 253). For Burge, the arbitrariness of a convention consists in the following facts: the conventions operative within a society emerge due to historical accident, not biological, psychological or sociological law; and, with effort comparable to that expended in learning the original convention, parties to the convention could have instead learned an incompatible convention that would have served roughly the same social purpose.