A Dictionary of Philosophy, Third Edition
. In logic and mathematics, any doctrine according to which A PRIORI truths or necessary truths are thought to be true by linguistic convention. Applied to science, conventionalist views emphasize that the laws and hypotheses we accept or postulate depend on convention (though we may have good reason for adopting one convention rather than another): we can explain the data of astronomy by Ptolemaic epicycles, it is claimed, though at the price of extreme complexity. For a conventionalist, a law found to be successful for predicting, etc., becomes analytic, i.e. nothing is any longer allowed to count as falsifying it. On some views it is only at this stage that it becomes a law. The real issue is perhaps how far convention enters in.
Conventionalism is close to INSTRUMENTALISM and PRAGMATISM.
See also MODALITIES, and cf. the views of Quine as discussed under ANALYTIC and TRANSLATION.
K.Britton, J.O.Urmson, W.C.Kneale, ‘Are necessary truths true by convention?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol., 1947.
H.Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, 1902, transl. 1905. (Supports a conventionalist view of science.)
K.R.Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Hutchinson, 1959 (German original, 1934). (Critical of some aspects (only?) of conventionalism in science.)
W.V.O.Quine, ‘Truth by convention’ in his The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, Random House, 1966 (originally published 1936 and variously reprinted). (Quine’s early view, developed in his later writings.)
A.Sidelle, Necessity, Essence, and Individuation: a Defense of Conventionalism, Cornell UP, 1989.
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