Constructivism and Conventionalism
"Conventionalism" and "constructivism" are kindred, often overlapping positions, asserting that the subject matter of some area of inquiry is not fully mind-independent. Conventionalism and constructivism are not well-defined names of positions but labels adopted—as often by critics as by advocates—to emphasize one positive aspect of positions in a wide range of areas; consequently, these terms group together a variety of positions with varying motivations. In general, the label "conventionalism" is applied to positions that claim the truths in some area are so in virtue of the conventions of a linguistic or conceptual scheme, while "constructivism" emphasizes that a position assigns to the cognitive faculties of humans some role in "making" the objects or facts in the area in question.
Conventionalism
Conventionalists claim either that the truths of some subject matter—such as mathematics or logic, or of a certain sort, such as necessary truths, or some dispute, such as whether Euclid's parallel postulate holds of our physical world—are matters of convention rather than of how the world is independent of mind. Some extreme versions of conventionalism take the fact that it is a matter of convention what our words mean (we could have used cat to designate Napoleon Bonaparte) to show that all truth is conventional.
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