Positivism and Conventionalism

Historicism, Entrenchment, and Conventionalism

W. V. Quine famously argues that though all knowledge is empirical, mathematics is entrenched relative to physics and the special sciences. Further, entrenchment accounts for the necessity of mathematics relative to these other disciplines. Michael Friedman challenges Quine’s view by appealing to historicism, the thesis that the nature of science is illuminated by taking into account its histor...

Conventionalism, Objectivity and Constitution

Most philosophers, whether they consider themselves naturalists or not, typically think that we can talk and think about objects in the world which are themselves independent of our conception of them. Unfortunately, providing a naturalistic explanation of how we can do this has proved notoriously difficult. In particular, naturalistic accounts of intentionality have had problems explaining how...

Positivism and realism pdf

Intentionalism versus The New Conventionalism

Are the properties of communicative acts grounded in the intentions with which they are performed, or in the conventions that govern them? The latest round in this debate has been sparked by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone (2015), who argue that much more of communication is conventional than we thought, and that the rest isn’t really communication after all, but merely the initiation of open-en...

Model-theoretic Conventionalism

By “model-theoretic conventionalism” I mean a strong form of semanticism concerning logic. Roughly, the view is that logic (indeed, any logic) is neither more nor less than a theory in a strict model-theoretic sense. Logic is a theory just as, say, ZermeloFraenkel set theory or Peano arithmetic are theories, semantically speaking: they are specified by a certain set of theses and principles exp...