According to linguistic conventionalism, necessities are to be explained in terms of the conventionally adopted rules that govern the use of linguistic expressions. A number of influential arguments against this view concerns the ‘Truth-Contrast Thesis’. This is the claim that necessary truths are fundamentally different from contingent ones since they are not made true by ‘the facts’. Instead, they are supposed to be something like ‘true in virtue of meaning’. This thesis is widely held to be a (...) core commitment of the conventionalist position, and the view is frequently rejected on the grounds that this thesis is untenable. I argue that this line of reasoning is mistaken. While the thesis should be rejected, it is not, I argue, entailed by linguistic conventionalism – nor was it invariably accepted by the paradigmatic conventionalists. (shrink)

We discuss in this paper the question of the scope of the principle of tolerance about languages promoted in Carnap's The Logical Syntax of Language and the nature of the analogy between it and the rudimentary conventionalism purportedly exhibited in the work of Poincaré and Hilbert. We take it more or less for granted that Poincaré and Hilbert do argue for conventionalism. We begin by sketching Coffa's historical account, which suggests that tolerance be interpreted as a conventionalism (...) that allows us complete freedom to select whatever language we wish—an interpretation that generalizes the conventionalism promoted by Poincaré and Hilbert which allows us complete freedom to select whatever axiom system we wish for geometry. We argue that such an interpretation saddles Carnap with a theory of meaning that has unhappy consequences, a theory we believe he did not hold. We suggest that the principle of linguistic tolerance in fact has a more limited scope; but within that scope the analogy between tolerance and geometric conventionalism is quite tight. (shrink)

Once upon a time, logical conventionalism was the most popular philosophical theory of logic. It was heavily favored by empiricists, logical positivists, and naturalists. According to logical conventionalism, linguistic conventions explain logical truth, validity, and modality. And conventions themselves are merely syntactic rules of language use, including inference rules. Logical conventionalism promised to eliminate mystery from the philosophy of logic by showing that both the metaphysics and epistemology of logic fit into a scientific picture of reality. (...) For naturalists of all stripes, this was paradise. Alas, paradise was lost. By the end of the twentieth century, logical conventionalism had been almost universally abandoned. But more recently, it has been revitalized. This chapter provides an overview of logical conventionalism and its history, clears away misunderstandings, and briefly responds to both the canonical objections to conventionalism (from Quine, Dummett, Boghossian, and many others) as well as new objections (from Field and Golan). From paradise lost, to paradise regained: logical conventionalism is back. (shrink)

Conventionalism about mathematics claims that mathematical truths are true by linguistic convention. This is often spelled out by appealing to facts concerning rules of inference and formal systems, but this leads to a problem: since the incompleteness theorems we’ve known that syntactic notions can be expressed using arithmetical sentences. There is serious prima facie tension here: how can mathematics be a matter of convention and syntax a matter of fact given the arithmetization of syntax? This challenge has been (...) pressed in the literature by Hilary Putnam and Peter Koellner. In this paper I sketch a conventionalist theory of mathematics, show that this conventionalist theory can meet the challenge just raised , and clarify the type of mathematical pluralism endorsed by the conventionalist by introducing the notion of a semantic counterpart. The paper’s aim is an improved understanding of conventionalism, pluralism, and the relationship between them. (shrink)

The daring idea that convention - human decision - lies at the root both of necessary truths and much of empirical science reverberates through twentieth-century philosophy, constituting a revolution comparable to Kant's Copernican revolution. This book provides a comprehensive study of Conventionalism. Drawing a distinction between two conventionalist theses, the under-determination of science by empirical fact, and the linguistic account of necessity, Yemima Ben-Menahem traces the evolution of both ideas to their origins in Poincaré's geometric conventionalism. She (...) argues that the radical extrapolations of Poincaré's ideas by later thinkers, including Wittgenstein, Quine, and Carnap, eventually led to the decline of conventionalism. This book provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century philosophy. Many of the major themes of contemporary philosophy emerge in this book as arising from engagement with the challenge of conventionalism. (shrink)

The daring idea that convention - human decision - lies at the root both of necessary truths and much of empirical science reverberates through twentieth-century philosophy, constituting a revolution comparable to Kant's Copernican revolution. This book provides a comprehensive study of Conventionalism. Drawing a distinction between two conventionalist theses, the under-determination of science by empirical fact, and the linguistic account of necessity, Yemima Ben-Menahem traces the evolution of both ideas to their origins in Poincaré's geometric conventionalism. She (...) argues that the radical extrapolations of Poincaré's ideas by later thinkers, including Wittgenstein, Quine, and Carnap, eventually led to the decline of conventionalism. This book provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century philosophy. Many of the major themes of contemporary philosophy emerge in this book as arising from engagement with the challenge of conventionalism. (shrink)

In this paper, I take issue with a core commitment of logical conventionalism: that we impose a logic on ourselves by adopting general linguistic conventions governing our use of logical terms, thereby determining the meanings of the logical constants and which of our inferences are valid. Drawing on Kripke’s ‘adoption problem’, I argue that general logical principles cannot be adopted, either explicitly or implicitly. I go on to argue that the meanings of our logical terms, and the validity (...) of our inferences, cannot depend on our adoption of logico-linguistic conventions. (shrink)

I consider Plato’s argument, in the dialogue Cratylus, against both of two opposed views of the “correctness of names.” The first is a conventionalist view, according to which this relationship is arbitrary, the product of a free inaugural decision made at the moment of the first institution of names. The second is a naturalist view, according to which the correctness of names is initially fixed and subsequently maintained by some kind of natural assignment, rooted in the things themselves. I argue (...) that: 1) Plato’s critical challenge to both views anticipates considerations introduced by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations ’ consideration of rules and rule-following; 2) Understanding Plato’s appeal to the “form” [ eidos ] of a thing in resolving the problems of both views helps to explicate Wittgenstein’s own appeal to “forms of life” as the “given” ground of linguistic practice; and 3) We should not understand the grounding of language in form-of-life either as a basis in the plural practices of different communities, or as a biological/anthropological basis in the specific nature of the human organism. Rather, it points to an autonomous dimension of form, which articulates the relationship between language and life as it relates to the possibility of truth. (shrink)

What is the source of logical and mathematical truth? This book revitalizes conventionalism as an answer to this question. Conventionalism takes logical and mathematical truth to have their source in linguistic conventions. This was an extremely popular view in the early 20th century, but it was never worked out in detail and is now almost universally rejected in mainstream philosophical circles. Shadows of Syntax is the first book-length treatment and defense of a combined conventionalist theory of logic (...) and mathematics. It argues that our conventions, in the form of syntactic rules of language use, are perfectly suited to explain the truth, necessity, and a priority of logical and mathematical claims, as well as our logical and mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the positivist–conventionalist interpretation of the Restricted Principle of Relativity is flawed, due to the positivists’ own understanding of conventions and their origins. I claim in the paper that, to understand the conventionalist thesis, one has to diambiguate between three types of convention; the linguistic conventions stemming from the fundamental role of mathematical axioms, the conventions stemming from the coordination betweeh theoretical statements and physical, observable facts or entities, and conventions that are made possible (...) by possible revisions to theory. I claim that it is not possible to interpret the Principle of Relativity as based on one of these three types of convention. This renders the conventionalist interpretation of the Principle of Relativity untenable. The paper is part of a larger project that aims to understand the philosophical significance of the Principle of Relativity. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the positivist–conventionalist interpretation of the Restricted Principle of Relativity is flawed, due to the positivists’ own understanding of conventions and their origins. I claim in the paper that, to understand the conventionalist thesis, one has to diambiguate between three types of convention; the linguistic conventions stemming from the fundamental role of mathematical axioms (conceptual conventions), the conventions stemming from the coordination betweeh theoretical statements and physical, observable facts or entities (coordinative definitions), and conventions (...) that are made possible by possible revisions to theory (the thesis of empirical underdetermination). I claim that it is not possible to interpret the Principle of Relativity as based on one of these three types of convention. This renders the conventionalist interpretation of the Principle of Relativity untenable. The paper is part of a larger project that aims to understand the philosophical significance of the Principle of Relativity. (shrink)

Quine's arguments for the indeterminacy of translation demonstrate the existence and help to explain the rationale of restraints upon what we can say and understand. In particular they show that there are logical truths to which there are no intelligible alternatives. Thus the standard view that the truths of logic and mathematics differ from "synthetic" statements in being true solely by virtue of linguistic convention--Which requires for its plausibility the existence of intelligible alternatives to our present logical truth--Is opposed (...) directly, And not by the espousal of "a more thorough pragmatism". This raises problems about possibility and conceptual novelty. (shrink)

Truth by convention, once thought to be the foundation of a uniquely promising approach to explaining our access to the truth in nonempirical domains, is nowadays widely considered an absurdity. Its fall from grace has been due largely to the influence of an argument that can be sketched as follows: our linguistic conventions have the power to make it the case that a sentence expresses a particular proposition, but they can’t by themselves generate truth; whether a given proposition is (...) true—and so whether the sentence that expresses it is true—is a matter of what the world is like, which means it isn’t a matter of convention alone. The consensus is that this argument is decisive against truth by convention. Strikingly, though, it has rarely been formulated with much precision. Here I provide a new rendering of the argument, one that reveals its structure and makes transparent just what assumptions it requires, and then I assess conventionalists’ prospects for resisting each of those assumptions. I conclude that the consensus is mistaken: contrary to what is almost universally thought, there remains a promising way forward for the conventionalist project. Along the way, I clarify conventionalists’ commitments by thinking about what truth by convention would need to be like in order for conventionalism to do the epistemological work it’s intended to do. (shrink)

This paper shows that Locke anticipates key features of Hume's more celebrated analysis of convention. It does so by developing Lenz's account of Lockean (linguistic) convention and its normativity, as presented in Socializing Minds. Locke's account of linguistic convention shares structural features also visible in Locke's treatment of the convention of money and property. The paper shows that Locke's ‘Humean' account of convention responds to a lacuna in Pufendorf’s treatment of linguistic convention that Lenz argues is significant (...) to Locke. (shrink)

Traditional conventionalism about modality claims that a proposition is necessarily true iff it is true by convention. In the wake of the widespread repudiation of truth-byconvention, traditional conventionalism has fallen out of favour. However, a family of theories of modality have arisen that, whilst abandoning truth-by-convention, retain the spirit of traditional conventionalism. These ‘neo-conventionalist’ theories surpass their forebears and don’t fall victim to the criticisms inherited through truth-by-convention. However, not all criticisms levelled at traditional conventionalism target (...) truth-by-convention. Any conventional theory of modality must face the contingency problem. This claims that the contingency of our linguistic conventions jeopardises the necessity of the necessities they determine. I present the contingency problem as relevant to both the traditional conventionalist and the neo-conventionalist. I examine a response from Einheuser that builds upon a response from Wright. I show that the Einheuser response does more to accommodate the conventionalist’s modal beliefs, but that it does not fully satisfy some further conditions that ought to be laid upon such a response. I then suggest how the response can be revised so as to satisfy these conditions. The resulting model of conventionalism is compatible with the validity of S4, and suitably in the spirit of conventionalism. (shrink)

In broadest terms, this thesis is concerned to answer the question of whether the view that arithmetic is analytic can be maintained consistently. Lest there be much suspense, I will conclude that it can. Those who disagree claim that accounts which defend the analyticity of arithmetic are either unable to give a satisfactory account of the foundations of mathematics due to the incompleteness theorems, or, if steps are taken to mitigate incompleteness, then the view loses the ability to account for (...) the applicability of mathematics in the sciences. I will show that this criticism is not successful against every view whereby arithmetic is analytic by showing that the brand of "conventionalism" about mathematics that Rudolf Carnap advocated in the 1930s, especially in Logical Syntax of Language, does not suffer from these difficulties. There, Carnap develops an account of logic and mathematics that ensures the analyticity of both. It is based on his famous "Principle of Tolerance", and so the major focus of this thesis will to defend this principle from certain criticisms that have arisen in the 80 years since the book was published. I claim that these criticisms all share certain misunderstandings of the principle, and, because my diagnosis of the critiques is that they misunderstand Carnap, the defense I will give is of a primarily historical and exegetical nature. Again speaking broadly, the defense will be split into two parts: one primarily historical and the other argumentative. The historical section concerns the development of Carnap's views on logic and mathematics, from their beginnings in Frege's lectures up through the publication of Logical Syntax. Though this material is well-trod ground, it is necessary background for the second part. In part two we shift gears, and leave aside the historical development of Carnap's views to examine a certain family of critiques of it. We focus on the version due to Kurt Gödel, but also explore four others found in the literature. In the final chapter, I develop a reading of Carnap's Principle - the `wide' reading. It is one whereby there are no antecedent constraints on the construction of linguistic frameworks. I argue that this reading of the principle resolves the purported problems. Though this thesis is not a vindication of Carnap's view of logic and mathematics tout court, it does show that the view has more plausibility than is commonly thought. (shrink)

Conventionalism about logic is the view that logical principles hold in virtue of some linguistic conventions. According to explicit conventionalism, these conventions have to be stipulated explicitly. Explicit conventionalism is subject to a famous criticism by Quine, who accused it of leading to an infinite regress. In response to the criticism, several authors have suggested reconstructing conventionalism as implicit in our linguistic behaviour. In this paper, drawing on a distinction from proof theory between derivable (...) and admissible rules, I argue that implicit conventionalism has not been stated in a sufficiently precise way, as it leaves open what one needs to say about admissible yet underivable rules. Moreover, it turns out that this challenge cannot be easily met, and that any attempt to meet the challenge makes conventionalism much less attractive a thesis. (shrink)

Kalhat has forcefully criticised Wittgenstein's linguistic or conventionalist account of logical necessity, drawing partly on Waismann and Quine. I defend conventionalism against the charge that it cannot do justice to the truth of necessary propositions, renders them unacceptably arbitrary or reduces them to metalingustic statements. At the same time, I try to reconcile Wittgenstein's claim that necessary propositions are constitutive of meaning with the logical positivists’ claim that they are true by virtue of meaning. Explaining necessary propositions by (...) reference to linguistic conventions does not reduce modal to non‐modal notions, but it avoids metaphysical accounts, which are incapable of explaining how we can have a priori knowledge of necessity. (shrink)

My target in this paper is a view that has sometimes been called the ‘ Linguistic Doctrine of Necessary Truth ’ and sometimes ‘Conventionalism about Necessity’. It is the view that necessity is grounded in the meanings of our expressions—meanings which are sometimes identified with the conventions governing those expressions—and that our knowledge of that necessity is based on our knowledge of those meanings or conventions. In its simplest form the view states that a truth, if it is (...) necessary, is necessary because it is analytic. It is widely recognized that this simple version of the view faces a prima facie problem with the existence of the necessary a posteriori. Assuming that all analytic truths are a priori, if there are necessary a posteriori truths then there are necessary synthetic truths—contradicting the view’s claim that all necessary truths are analytic. Contemporary L-DONTers have things to say about the problem, but in this paper I want to suggest that there is a different, more serious, problem which arises from the phenomenon of indexicality, which L-DONTers have not taken account of. Though there are many versions of the problem, a simple one is this. Consider Kaplan’s celebrated sentence. (shrink)

Kalhat has forcefully criticised Wittgenstein's linguistic or conventionalist account of logical necessity, drawing partly on Waismann and Quine. I defend conventionalism against the charge that it cannot do justice to the truth of necessary propositions, renders them unacceptably arbitrary or reduces them to metalingustic statements. At the same time, I try to reconcile Wittgenstein's claim that necessary propositions are constitutive of meaning with the logical positivists' claim that they are true by virtue of meaning. Explaining necessary propositions by (...) reference to linguistic conventions does not reduce modal to non-modal notions, but it avoids metaphysical accounts, which are incapable of explaining how we can have a priori knowledge of necessity. (shrink)

In this paper I examine a contemporary debate about the general notion of linguistic rules and the place of context in determining meaning, which has arisen in the wake of a challenge that the conceptual framework of moral particularism has brought to the table. My aim is to show that particularism in the theory of meaning yields an attractive model of linguistic competence that stands as a genuine alternative to other use-oriented but still generalist accounts that allow room (...) for context-sensitivity in deciding how the linguistic rules would apply in concrete cases. I argue that the ideas developed in relation to particularism in meta-ethics illuminate a difficulty with the modest generalist view, one that can be resolved by adopting semantic particularism instead. (shrink)

Plausible recent arguments for the existence of necessary truths a posteriori have led many philosophers to believe, at least implicitly, that conventionalism about necessity is false, and that necessity is in fact a real-world quantity. Necessary truths, on this view, are no more independent upon our linguistic conventions than any other truths; assertions of necessity and essential predications are, like any other claims, true or false as they correspond or not to a wholly independent reality. I believe that (...) this view is not supported by the finding of necessary truths a posteriori, and further, that we have excellent reason to reject this realism about necessity, and to accept instead a conventionalist account. My dissertation attempts to argue for this view, and to present and defend such a conventionalist account. ;In Chapter One, I present a conventionalist explanation of necessary truths a posteriori, and thus argue that the existence of such truths does not establish realism about necessity. My account makes use of general conventions which I call 'general principles of individuation.' If these principles are products of our conventions, then we can both allow for and explain how there can be such 'empirical' necessary truths within a conventionalist framework. ;Chapter Two argues that conventionalism about necessity and essences has traditionally been grounded in metaphysical worries about necessity, not upon now outdated epistemological and semantic views, as is often claimed by the opponents of conventionalism. ;In Chapter Three, I present my central arguments for conventionalism and against realism about necessity. I argue that only conventionalism can explain how we have the knowledge that we do of what is necessary, and further, that it is not even clear that we can make sense of necessity as an independent feature of the world. Chapter Four responds to worries stemming from the fact that my account requires that there be systematically important analytic truths. ;Finally, in Chapter Five, I attempt to apply my findings to the theory of reference. I argue that if conventionalism about necessity and essences is true, then empiricist semantics must be basically correct, and that causal theories of reference must thus be either compatible with empiricist semantics, or false. (shrink)

Each of the three essays constituting the dissertation's body explores a theoretical approach to conceptual content, as well as to particular kinds of concepts. A concluding chapter defends a distinction between two varieties of intentionality. ;Chapter 1 identifies a distinctive model of intentionality in Locke's discussion of our "ideas of the sorts of substances." Properly understood, his doctrine of the "inadequacy" of substance-ideas reveals that the sort represented by such an idea isn't settled by the idea's descriptive content. The key (...) to his compromise between classificatory conventionalism and essentialism is an injunction to "rectify" each substance-idea, one that reflects a norm governing natural-historical inquiry. Interestingly, Locke regards the resulting picture of the natural kinds represented by substance-ideas as compatible with his descriptivist account of how the extensions of substance-names are fixed. ;Chapter 2 examines Gupta and Belnap's theory of "circular concepts," which likewise appeals to a semantic "revision rule." Besides promising to explain semantic paradox when applied to the concept of truth, their theory significantly liberalizes the framework of truth conditional semantics. I criticize the rationale behind that liberalization by investigating the significance attributed to the revision rule, and propose invoking pragmatic ideas to do justice to some of the theory's motivating intuitions. ;Chapter 3 first argues that Brandom's appeal to normatively characterized linguistic practice subserves two approaches to content: one expressivist and the other reductionist. The criterion of adequacy motivating his "inferentialist" reduction of contentfulness, I then argue, is one he should dismiss in view of his deflationism about truth. Moreover, Brandom fails to vindicate the priority of attributions of inferential norms over attributions of propositional content. This criticism doesn't affect the expressivist elucidation of intentional concepts resulting from Brandom's normative-pragmatic description of assertional practice. ;My conclusion draws on this elucidation to defend a distinction prefigured in my construal of Locke as divorcing the aboutness of substance-ideas from assessments of truth. I argue that we should distinguish between a "representational" kind of intentionality whose attribution subserves explanations of successful inductive and explanatory practices, and a "semantic" kind whose attribution makes explicit normative features of the essentially communicative practice of assertion. (shrink)

The original publication of the article contains two formatting errors, the second of which significantly inhibits readability.

This paper examines the role of speaker intentions in issues of reference determination for context-sensitive expressions, focusing on demonstratives. Intuitively, the referent of a token utterance of ‘that’ is fixed by the speaker’s intentions. However, if this is right it causes a potential problem for so-called formal theories of meaning. I begin by setting out the nature of this problem and proceed to explore three putative solutions. First, the assumption that speaker intentions fix reference in these cases may be rejected; (...) second, it may be held that current speaker intentions are relevant but that they can be accommodated within a formal semantic theory; third, reference determination and semantic content may be held strictly apart. I reject the first two of these moves, termed respectively ‘conventionalism’ and ‘non-inferentialism’, but argue that the third move provides an appealing way for the formal semanticist to accommodate the content of context-sensitive expressions.Este artigo examina o papel das intenções do falante no que diz respeito à determinação da referência para expressões, concentrando-se nos demonstrativos. Intuitivamente, o referente de um proferimento-token de ‘aquilo’ é fixado pelas intenções do falante. Se isto é correto, no entanto, temos um problema potencial para as chamadas teorias formais do significado. Eu começarei fixando a natureza deste problema e, em seguida, explorarei três supostas soluções. Primeiro, a assunção de que a intenção do falante fixa a referência nestes casos pode ser rejeitada; segundo, pode ser sustentada a tese de que as intenções correntes do falante são relevantes, mas podem ser acomodadas em uma teoria semântica formal; terceiro, a determinação da referência e o conteúdo semântico podem ser mantidos estritamente separados. Eu rejeito as duas primeiras possibilidades acima, chamadas respectivamente de ‘convencio-nalismo’ e ‘não-inferencialismo’, mas argumento que a terceira provê uma forma atraente para o semanticista formal de acomodar o conteúdo de expressões sensíveis ao contexto. (shrink)

This paper offers an interpretation of Plato's Cratylus 427d1-431c3 that supports a reading of the dialogue as a whole as concluding in favour of a conventionalist account of naming. While many previous interpretations note the value of this passage as evidence for Platonic investigations of false propositions, this paper argues that its demonstration that there can be false (or incorrect) naming in turn refutes the naturalist account of naming; that is, it shows that a natural relation between name and nominatum (...) is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for reference. Socrates secures this outcome by using demonstratives and their concomitants to show how any putative natural imitative link between name and object may be overridden. Furthermore, Socrates' employment of demonstratives and context-dependent statements in his case-studies of false naming speaks in favour of a reading of this passage as primarily focussing on naming rather than on propositions in general. (shrink)

In “Truth by Convention” W.V. Quine gave an influential argument against logical conventionalism. Even today his argument is often taken to decisively refute logical conventionalism. Here I break Quine’s arguments into two— the super-task argument and the regress argument—and argue that while these arguments together refute implausible explicit versions of conventionalism, they cannot be successfully mounted against a more plausible implicit version of conventionalism. Unlike some of his modern followers, Quine himself recognized this, but argued that (...) implicit conventionalism was explanatorily idle. Against this I show that pace Quine’s claim that implicit conventionalism has no content beyond the claim that logic is firmly accepted, implicit rules of inference can be used to distinguish the firmly accepted from the conventional. As part of my case, I argue that positing syntactic rules of inference as part of our linguistic competence follows from the same methodology that leads contemporary linguists and cognitive scientists to posit rules of phonology, morphology, and grammar. The upshot of my discussion is a diagnosis of the fallacy in Quine’s master critique of logical conventionalism and a re-opening of possibilities for an attractive conventionalist theory of logic. (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap’s principle of tolerance states that there is no need to justify the adoption of a logic by philosophical means. Carnap uses the freedom provided by this principle in his philosophy of mathematics: he wants to capture the idea that mathematical truth is a matter of linguistic rules by relying on a strong metalanguage with infinitary inference rules. In this paper, I give a new interpretation of an argument by E. W. Beth, which shows that the principle of (...) tolerance does not suffice to remove all obstacles to the employment of infinitary rules. (shrink)

I argue that conventionalists should construe a posteriori necessity as restricted necessity. I take Sidelle’s defence of the conventionalist explanation of a posteriori necessity against the contingency problem as the starting point. Sidelle construes a posteriori necessity as unrestricted necessity and then argues that a posteriori necessity is to be considered under a fixed convention and is thus irrelevant to the contingent nature of our linguistic conventions. I offer a different solution to the contingency problem. I argue that conventionalists (...) should construe a posteriori necessity as restricted necessity based upon a use-based meta-semantic picture. Restricted necessity is contingent in a broader sense and does not conflict with the contingency of conventions. My solution allows conventionalists to explain a posteriori necessity as restricted necessity. I show that the realist’s arguments for a posteriori necessity are unconvincing in regard to real modal features and a posteriori necessity as unrestricted necessity. We thus have good reason to continue to accept a posteriori necessity as restricted necessity under the conventionalist explanation. (shrink)

There’s a tendency to suppose that a naturalist is automatically, by virtue of her naturalism, committed to some particular view of logic. These days, for example, the classical Quinean picture is sometimes taken to be the naturalistic standard: logic lies at the center of the web of belief; remote from sense experience, but widely confirmed by its role in all our successful theorizing; a posteriori like the rest, but also the most resistant to change, given the principle of minimum mutilation; (...) and thus apparently, or even practically, a priori. 1 But others, at other times, have held that other views of logic followed directly from naturalism, say psychologism, or simple inductivism, or some form of linguistic conventionalism. The trouble is that ‘naturalism’ means something different in each case, or that it comes encumbered with various inessential add-ons (like holism). (shrink)

LEWIS’s philosophy is most frequently linked with linguistic conventionalism and is interpreted as reductivistic in its theory of meaning and anti-metaphysical both in spirit and in specific content. Indeed, Lewis is often considered to represent a turning point in American philosophy, marking the beginning of its move away from classical American pragmatism and toward the analytic tradition—either the Vienna Circle type of positivism and constructionalism or the British ordinary language analysis of the post Wittgenstenian variety. True, Lewis is (...) a pragmatist of sorts—a pragmatic analyst. Such a standard script leads inevitably to the fashionable conclusion that there is "something very wrong" with his thought—his construction of objects out of sense-data does not work; his doctrine of the given is self-contradictory, etc. Thus, Lewis’s position becomes significant as an historical lesson in how not to construct one’s analytic philosophy. And, indeed, the fashionable conclusion is, in a certain sense, quite right. His "analytic philosophy" is open to all sorts of reasonable objections by reasonable critics. However, Lewis’s position yields such inadequate analytic philosophy precisely because his pragmatic position does not have its philosophic kinship with the analytic tradition but rather is permeated both in spirit and in content by the tradition of classical American pragmatism. (shrink)

While environmental ethics has flourished and contributed to the discussion of environmental policy, other areas of philosophy (epistemology, for example), have been less in evidence in these discussions. In this paper, we explore a role for these neglected areas: they are best viewed as meta-level discussions of the conceptual and linguistic problems that arise as scientists develop models at the edges of scientific fields relevant to our understanding of environmental problems and possible solutions. The relevant fields, which might differ (...) depending on the specific environmental problem being addressed, can be thought of as a collection of “philosophies of ____” where the blank stands for one of the relevant disciplines, such as biology, ecology, or economics. We eschew the typical arguments regarding which models are correct in favor of a pragmatic/pluralistic approach to understanding scientific models. This pragmatic approach softens interdisciplinary conflicts as Rudolf Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance (linguistic conventionalism) urges an experimental approach to developing linguistic frameworks for differing situations. This approach is illustrated by an examination of the models proposed by ecologists and economists. (shrink)

Can we develop a Critical Philosophy without resorting either to transcendental idealism or to linguistic conventionalism; that is, without resorting to either of these accounts of the a priori? I argue that we can, by focusing on the notion of a reason: the basic normative concept, which provides the ‘interface’ between self and thought about an objective world.

It is central to Davidson’s argument in ‘A nice derangement of epitaphs’ that a speaker’s utterance can have a non-standard meaning, rather than that the speaker can mean something non-standardly when so uttering. Linguistic conventionalism typically holds that Mrs Malaprop, in uttering ‘a nice derangement of epitaphs’, might mean a nice arrangement of epithets but that her words do not. I suggest that Davidson’s view of language provides him with good grounds to claim that the nonstandard meanings can (...) be attributed to a speaker’s utterances and not merely the speakers themselves. However, I also suggest that in many cases of interpretation of non-standard utterances, communication is successful because an interpreter first grasps the speaker’s relevant intentions, rather than the meaning of the utterance itself. Indeed, in a single communicative exchange containing an innovative utterance successfully interpreted, it is not the meaning of the utterance that one is entitled to say is identified, but what a speaker means to communicate when he produces an utterance. (shrink)

I argue, contra Sabina Lovibond, that one cannot defend a viable form of moral realism from the perspective of linguistic conventionalism. Appealing to the later Wittgenstein, I argue that Wittgenstein's alleged linguistic conventionalism rests on the objective ground of the notion of a rule. While Wittgenstein acknowledges that the subjective and social context out of which we operate precludes getting at reality independent of a perspective, neither is he an anti-realist nor does he replace truth conditions (...) with assertibility conditions. If conventions are grounded in the notion of a rule, we can then use this conclusion to defend a form or moral realism. (shrink)