  Perhaps the most striking aspect of Millikan’s discussion is that it assigns no essential role to rationality in sustaining conventions. For instance, a society in which people maintain a convention simply from unreflective conformism would satisfy Millikan’s definition. The tradition established by Hume and continued by Lewis seeks to explain how social order emerges from the rational decisions of individual agents. Millikan rejects that tradition. To some extent, Burge also departs from the tradition, writing that “the stability of conventions is safeguarded not only by enlightened self-interest, but by inertia, superstition, and ignorance” (p. 253). However, Millikan’s position is more extreme than Burge’s, since she assigns reason no role in sustaining convention. In other words, whereas Burge apparently thinks that convention rests upon both rational and irrational underpinnings, Millikan does not acknowledge any rational underpinnings.