  Ruth Millikan (2005) offers a radical alternative to the views surveyed so far. She draws inspiration not from economics or sociology but from biology. On her view, a convention is a pattern of behavior reproduced within a population due largely to weight of precedent. To say that an instance of some pattern “reproduces” previous instances is to say that, if the previous instance had been different, the current instance would be correspondingly different. Many patterns of behavior are “reproduced” in this sense, such as the propensity to greet one another by shaking hands in a certain way. However, not all reproduced patterns are conventions. For instance, we learn from our parents to open stuck jars by immersing them in hot water, but our reproduction of this pattern is not a convention. To count as a convention, a reproduced pattern must be reproduced, in large part, simply because it is a precedent, not because of its intrinsic merits. Thus, a convention is unlikely to emerge independently in different populations, in contrast with a pattern such as immersing stuck jars in hot water.