Results for 'Conventionalism'

151 found
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  1. Conventionalism about time direction.Matt Farr - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-21.
    In what sense is the direction of time a matter of convention? In 'The Direction of Time', Hans Reichenbach makes brief reference to parallels between his views about the status of time’s direction and his conventionalism about geometry. In this article, I: (1) provide a conventionalist account of time direction motivated by a number of Reichenbach’s claims in the book; (2) show how forwards and backwards time can give equivalent descriptions of the world despite the former being the ‘natural’ (...)
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  2. Conventionalism about Persons and the Nonidentity Problem.Michael Tze-Sung Longenecker - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):954-967.
    ABSTRACT I motivate ‘Origin Conventionalism’—the view that which facts about one’s origins are essential to one’s existence depends partly on our person-directed attitudes. One important upshot is that the view offers a novel and attractive solution to the Nonidentity Problem. That problem typically assumes that the sperm-egg pair from which a person originates is essential to that person’s existence; in which case, for many future persons that come into existence under adverse conditions, had those conditions not been realized, the (...)
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  3. Logical Conventionalism.Jared Warren - unknown - In Filippo Ferrari, Elke Brendel, Massimiliano Carrara, Ole Hjortland, Gil Sagi, Gila Sher & Florian Steinberger (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Logic. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    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 (...)
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  4.  42
    Conventionalism about Persons and Reflexive Reference: A Contextualized Approach.Michael Tze-Sung Longenecker - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.
    Many Perdurantists have been drawn to the “Conventionalist” idea that our person-directed attitudes can determine whether or not we survive events such as teletransportation. In this paper, I suggest a novel “Contextualist Conventionalism” according to which Conventionalism is true with respect to some, but not all, contexts in which we ask “will I survive?”—instead in “reflexive” contexts, “I” reflexively refers to a thinker whose persistence conditions are mind-independent. Unlike one form of Conventionalism which implies that the reference (...)
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  5. A Conventionalist Account of Distinctively Mathematical Explanation.Mark Povich - 2023 - Philosophical Problems in Science 74:171–223.
    Distinctively mathematical explanations (DMEs) explain natural phenomena primarily by appeal to mathematical facts. One important question is whether there can be an ontic account of DME. An ontic account of DME would treat the explananda and explanantia of DMEs as ontic structures and the explanatory relation between them as an ontic relation (e.g., Pincock 2015, Povich 2021). Here I present a conventionalist account of DME, defend it against objections, and argue that it should be considered ontic. Notably, if indeed it (...)
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  6. Was Wittgenstein a radical conventionalist?Ásgeir Berg - 2024 - Synthese 203 (2):1-31.
    This paper defends a reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics in the Lectures on the Foundation of Mathematics as a radical conventionalist one, whereby our agreement about the particular case is constitutive of our mathematical practice and ‘the logical necessity of any statement is a direct expression of a convention’ (Dummett 1959, p. 329). -/- On this view, mathematical truths are conceptual truths and our practices determine directly for each mathematical proposition individually whether it is true or false. Mathematical truths (...)
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  7. Carnap’s conventionalism in geometry.Stefan Lukits - 2013 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 88 (1):123-138.
    Against Thomas Mormann's argument that differential topology does not support Carnap's conventionalism in geometry we show their compatibility. However, Mormann's emphasis on the entanglement that characterizes topology and its associated metrics is not misplaced. It poses questions about limits of empirical inquiry. For Carnap, to pose a question is to give a statement with the task of deciding its truth. Mormann's point forces us to introduce more clarity to what it means to specify the task that decides between competing (...)
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  8. Ordinary Language, Conventionalism and a priori Knowledge.Henry Jackman - 2001 - Dialectica 55 (4):315-325.
    This paper examines popular‘conventionalist’explanations of why philosophers need not back up their claims about how‘we’use our words with empirical studies of actual usage. It argues that such explanations are incompatible with a number of currently popular and plausible assumptions about language's ‘social’character. Alternate explanations of the philosopher's purported entitlement to make a priori claims about‘our’usage are then suggested. While these alternate explanations would, unlike the conventionalist ones, be compatible with the more social picture of language, they are each shown to (...)
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  9. Plato on conventionalism.Rachel Barney - 1997 - Phronesis 42 (2):143 - 162.
    A new reading of Plato's account of conventionalism about names in the Cratylus. It argues that Hermogenes' position, according to which a name is whatever anybody 'sets down' as one, does not have the counterintuitive consequences usually claimed. At the same time, Plato's treatment of conventionalism needs to be related to his treatment of formally similar positions in ethics and politics. Plato is committed to standards of objective natural correctness in all such areas, despite the problematic consequences which, (...)
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  10. Against Depictive Conventionalism.Catharine Abell - 2005 - American Philosophical Quarterly 42 (3):185 - 197.
    In this paper, I discuss the influential view that depiction, like language, depends on arbitrary conventions. I argue that this view, however it is elaborated, is false. Any adequate account of depiction must be consistent with the distinctive features of depiction. One such feature is depictive generativity. I argue that, to be consistent with depictive generativity, conventionalism must hold that depiction depends on conventions for the depiction of basic properties of a picture’s object. I then argue that two considerations (...)
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  11. Conventionalism: Poincaré, Duhem, Reichenbach.Torsten Wilholt - 2012 - In James Robert Brown (ed.), Philosophy of Science: The Key Thinkers. New York: Continuum Books. pp. 32.
    A recurrent theme in philosophy of science since the early twentieth century is the idea that at least some basic tenets within scientific theories ought to be understood as conventions. Various versions of this idea have come to be grouped together under the label ‘conventionalism’. This chapter presents and discusses some important historical stages in the development of conventionalism. Particular attention is paid to the contributions made by Henri Poincaré, Pierre Duhem and Hans Reichenbach.
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  12. What Is Conventionalism about Moral Rights and Duties?Katharina Nieswandt - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1):15-28.
    A powerful objection against moral conventionalism says that it gives the wrong reasons for individual rights and duties. The reason why I must not break my promise to you, for example, should lie in the damage to you—rather than to the practice of promising or to all other participants in that practice. Common targets of this objection include the theories of Hobbes, Gauthier, Hooker, Binmore, and Rawls. I argue that the conventionalism of these theories is superficial; genuinely conventionalist (...)
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  13. Realism, Antirealism, and Conventionalism about Race.Jonathan Michael Kaplan & Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (5):1039-1052.
    This paper distinguishes three concepts of "race": bio-genomic cluster/race, biological race, and social race. We map out realism, antirealism, and conventionalism about each of these, in three important historical episodes: Frank Livingstone and Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1962, A.W.F. Edwards' 2003 response to Lewontin (1972), and contemporary discourse. Semantics is especially crucial to the first episode, while normativity is central to the second. Upon inspection, each episode also reveals a variety of commitments to the metaphysics of race. We conclude by (...)
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  14. Conventionalism and the Impoverishment of the Space of Reasons: Carnap, Quine and Sellars.Kenneth R. Westphal - 2015 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 3 (8).
    This article examines how Quine and Sellars develop informatively contrasting responses to a fundamental tension in Carnap’s semantics ca. 1950. Quine’s philosophy could well be styled ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism’; his assay of radical empiricism is invaluable for what it reveals about the inherent limits of empiricism. Careful examination shows that Quine’s criticism of Carnap’s semantics in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ fails, that at its core Quine’s semantics is for two key reasons incoherent and that his hallmark Thesis of Extensionalism (...)
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  15. (1 other version)Carnap's metrical conventionalism versus differential topology.Thomas Mormann - 2004 - Proc. 2004 Biennial Meeting of the PSA, vol. I, Contributed Papers 72 (5):814 - 825.
    Geometry was a main source of inspiration for Carnap’s conventionalism. Taking Poincaré as his witness Carnap asserted in his dissertation Der Raum (Carnap 1922) that the metrical structure of space is conventional while the underlying topological structure describes "objective" facts. With only minor modifications he stuck to this account throughout his life. The aim of this paper is to disprove Carnap's contention by invoking some classical theorems of differential topology. By this means his metrical conventionalism turns out to (...)
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  16. An Empirical Route to Logical 'Conventionalism'.Eugene Chua - 2017 - In Baltag Alexandru, Seligman Jeremy & Yamada Tomoyuki (eds.), Logic, Rationality, and Interaction. LORI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10455. Springer. pp. 631-636.
    The laws of classical logic are taken to be logical truths, which in turn are taken to hold objectively. However, we might question our faith in these truths: why are they true? One general approach, proposed by Putnam [8] and more recently Dickson [3] or Maddy [5], is to adopt empiricism about logic. On this view, logical truths are true because they are true of the world alone – this gives logical truths an air of objectivity. Putnam and Dickson both (...)
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  17. The limits of conventional justification: inductive risk and industry bias beyond conventionalism.Miguel Ohnesorge - 2020 - Frontiers in Research Metric and Analytics 14.
    This article develops a constructive criticism of methodological conventionalism. Methodological conventionalism asserts that standards of inductive risk ought to be justified in virtue of their ability to facilitate coordination in a research community. On that view, industry bias occurs when conventional methodological standards are violated to foster industry preferences. The underlying account of scientific conventionality, however, is problematically incomplete. Conventions may be justified in virtue of their coordinative functions, but often qualify for posterior empirical criticism as research advances. (...)
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  18. On Becoming a Rooster: Zhuangzian Conventionalism and the Survival of Death.Michael Tze-Sung Longenecker - 2022 - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 21 (1):61-79.
    The Zhuangzi 莊子 depicts persons as surviving their deaths through the natural transformations of the world into very different forms—such as roosters, cart-wheels, rat livers, and so on. It is common to interpret these passages metaphorically. In this essay, however, I suggest employing a “Conventionalist” view of persons that says whether a person survives some event is not merely determined by the world, but is partly determined by our own attitudes. On this reading, Zhuangzi’s many teachings urging us to embrace (...)
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  19. On the Cartesian Ontology of General Relativity: Or, Conventionalism in the History of the Substantival‐Relational Debate.Edward Slowik - 2005 - Philosophy of Science 72 (5):1312-1323.
    Utilizing Einstein’s comparison of General Relativity and Descartes’ physics, this investigation explores the alleged conventionalism that pervades the ontology of substantival and relationist conceptions of spacetime. Although previously discussed, namely by Rynasiewicz and Hoefer, it will be argued that the close similarities between General Relativity and Cartesian physics have not been adequately treated in the literature—and that the disclosure of these similarities bolsters the case for a conventionalist interpretation of spacetime ontology.
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  20. All Together Now: Conventionalism and Everyday Moral Life.Erin Taylor - manuscript
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  21. Poincare's conventionalism and Wittgenstein's grammatical method (Конвенционализм Пуанкаре и грамматический метод Витгенштейна).Francois-Igor Pris - 2019 - Bulletin of Chelyabinsk State University 12 (54):111-116.
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  22. Global Justice and Practice‐Dependence: Conventionalism, Institutionalism, Functionalism.Laura Valentini - 2010 - Journal of Political Philosophy 19 (4):399-418.
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  23. Review of Alexander Linsbichler’s Was Ludwig von Mises a Conventionalist? A New Analysis of the Epistemology of the Austrian School of Economics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, ix + 151 pp. [REVIEW]Scott Scheall - 2017 - Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 10 (2):110-115.
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  24. Decifrare il convenzionalismo dell'identità personale.Kristie Miller - 2009 - Rivista di Estetica 41:59-83.
    Conventionalism’ about personal-identity is an umbrella term for a cluster of views. All these views accept the core idea that conventions, or what are often known as person-directed practices, are crucially involved in the identity of persons over time, and that had those conventions or practices been different, the individuation and persistence conditions of persons would have been different.The purpose of this paper is not to argue for conventionalism broadly understood, nor for any particular version of conventionalism. (...)
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  25.  37
    Hypothesis and Convention in Poincaré’s Defense of Galilei Spacetime.Scott Walter - 2009 - In Michael Heidelberger & Gregor Schiemann (eds.), The Significance of the Hypothetical in Natural Science. De Gruyter. pp. 193-220.
    According to the conventionalist doctrine of space elaborated by the French philosopher-scientist Henri Poincaré in the 1890s, the geometry of physical space is a matter of definition, not of fact. Poincaré's Hertz-inspired view of the role of hypothesis in science guided his interpretation of the theory of relativity (1905), which he found to be in violation of the axiom of free mobility of invariable solids. In a quixotic effort to save the Euclidean geometry that relied on this axiom, Poincaré extended (...)
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  26. Community-Made Selves.Michael Tze-Sung Longenecker - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (3):459-470.
    Conventionalists hold that the sorts of events that one survives—such as teletransportation, or a brain transplant—is at least partly determined by our attitudes. But if Conventionalism is true, whose attitudes directly determine whether one survives? Do the individual's attitudes do all the work as Private Conventionalists hold, or do the community's attitudes also factor in as Public Conventionalists hold? There has recently been a greater push towards Private Conventionalism, while explicit arguments for Public Conventionalism are difficult to (...)
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  27. Assessor Relative Conativism.Kristie Miller - 2024 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (1):96-115.
    According to conventionalist or conativist views about personal-identity, utterances of personal-identity sentences express propositions that are, in part, made true by the conative attitudes of relevant persons-stages. In this paper I introduce assessor relative conativism: the view that a personal-identity proposition can be true when evaluated at one person-stage's context and false when evaluated at another person-stage's context, because person-stages have different patterns of conative attitudes. I present several reasons to embrace assessor relative conativism over its more familiar realizer relative (...)
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  28. Linguistic convention and worldly fact: Prospects for a naturalist theory of the a priori.Brett Topey - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (7):1725-1752.
    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 (...)
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  29. Laws as Conventional Norms.Nicholas Southwood - 2019 - In David Plunkett, Scott Shapiro & Kevin Toh (eds.), Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    A persistent worry concerning conventionalist accounts of law is that such accounts are ill equipped to account for law’s special normativity. I offer a particular kind of conventionalist account that is based on the practice-dependent account of conventional norms I have offered elsewhere and consider whether it is vulnerable to the Normativity Objection. I argue that it isn’t. It can account for all the ways in which law can justly claim to be normative. While there are ways of being normative (...)
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  30. (1 other version)Boundaries in Reality.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2012 - Ratio 25 (4):405-424.
    This paper defends the idea that there must be some joints in reality, some correct way to classify or categorize it. This may seem obvious, but we will see that there are at least three conventionalist arguments against this idea, as well as philosophers who have found them convincing. The thrust of these arguments is that the manner in which we structure, divide or carve up the world is not grounded in any natural, genuine boundaries in the world. Ultimately they (...)
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  31. Chronometric Explanations.Giuliano Torrengo - 2016 - Philosophia 44 (1):275-287.
    In this paper I present a problem for the conventionalist regarding temporal metrics, and I defend an objectivist position on the ground of its explanatory force. Roughly, the conventionalist has it that there is no fact of the matter with respect to the truth or falsity of judgments of the kind “event e1 lasted as long as event e2”, while the objectivist thinks that they are grounded in objective features of space-time. I argue that, by positing grounds for judgments of (...)
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  32. Rethinking Incest Avoidance: Beyond the Disciplinary Groove of Culture-First Views.Robert A. Wilson - 2020 - Biological Theory 16 (3):162-175.
    The Westermarck Effect posits that intimate association during childhood promotes human incest avoidance. In previous work, I articulated and defended a version of the Westermarck Effect by developing a phylogenetic argument that has purchase within primatology but that has had more limited appeal for cultural anthropologists due to their commitment to conventionalist or culture-first accounts of incest avoidance. Here I look to advance the discussion of incest and incest avoidance beyond culture-first accounts in two ways. First, I shall dig deeper (...)
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  33. Thomas Reid on Induction and Natural Kinds.Stephen Harrop - 2022 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 20 (1):1-18.
    I examine the views of Thomas Reid with respect to a certain version of the problem of induction: Why are inductions using natural kinds successful, and what justifies them? I argue that while both Reid holds a kind of conventionalist view about natural kinds, this conventionalism has a realistic component which allows him to answer both questions.
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  34. Radykalny konwencjonalizm współcześnie.Trela Renata - 2014 - Argument: Biannual Philosophical Journal 4 (2):325-340.
    Inthisarticle,IreconstructKazimierzAjdukiewicz’sviewthathecalledradical conventiona‐ l i s m (as opposed to moderate conventionalism developed by Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem). then, I recall little‐known criticism of this approach developed by Stefan Amsterdamski. Finally, I demonstrate, contrary to the conception of the originator’s declarations, that a radical conventio‐ nalism is not a ‘paper ction’. On the other hand, the standpoint of radical conventionalism is useful due to the precision of expressions provided to it by Ajdukiewicz; it shows the di culties that (...)
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  35. Practice-Based Justice: An Introduction.Hugo El Kholi - 2013 - Raisons Politiques 51:7-42.
    The purpose of this introduction is two-fold. First, it is to provide readers unfamiliar with the debates on practice-dependence with the insight necessary to fully comprehend the different contributions to this volume. Second, it is to make readers already well versed in practice-dependence more sensible to the substantive nature of this view and to provide them with a workable typology. After establishing a first distinction between metaphysical, relational and practice-dependent conceptions of justice, I draw a line, among practice-dependent views, between (...)
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  36. The Normative Force of Promising.Jack Woods - 2016 - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 6:77-101.
    Why do promises give rise to reasons? I consider a quadruple of possibilities which I think will not work, then sketch the explanation of the normativity of promising I find more plausible—that it is constitutive of the practice of promising that promise-breaking implies liability for blame and that we take liability for blame to be a bad thing. This effects a reduction of the normativity of promising to conventionalism about liability together with instrumental normativity and desire-based reasons. This is (...)
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  37. A função e natureza das convenções e hipóteses segundo o convencionalismo francês da virada do século XIX para o XX: relações entre ciência e metafísica nas obras de Henri Poincaré, Pierre Durem e Édouard Le Roy.Andre Philot - 2015 - Dissertation, Rio de Janeiro State University
    In this work we present the function and we determine the nature of conventions and hypotheses for the scientific foundations according with the conventionalist doctrine that arose in France during the turning of the XIX century to the XX. The doctrine was composed by Henri Poincaré, Pierre Duhem and Édouard Le Roy. Moreover, we analyze the relation that conventions and hypotheses can establish with metaphysical thesis through criteria used by scientists in order to determine the preference for certain theories. Thereunto, (...)
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  38. Authors, Intentions and Literary Meaning.Sherri Irvin - 2006 - Philosophy Compass 1 (2):114–128.
    This article discusses the relationship (or lack thereof) between authors’ intentions and the meaning of literary works. It considers the advantages and disadvantages of Extreme and Modest Actual Intentionalism, Conventionalism, and two versions of Hypothetical Intentionalism, and discusses the role that one’s theoretical commitments about the robustness of linguistic conventions and the publicity of literary works should play in determining which view one accepts.
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  39. Toward 'Perfect Collections of Properties': Locke on the Constitution of Substantial Sorts.Lionel Shapiro - 1999 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (4):551-593.
    Locke's claims about the "inadequacy" of substance-ideas can only be understood once it is recognized that the "sort" represented by such an idea is not wholly determined by the idea's descriptive content. The key to his compromise between classificatory conventionalism and essentialism is his injunction to "perfect" the abstract ideas that serve as "nominal essences." This injunction promotes the pursuit of collections of perceptible qualities that approach ever closer to singling out things that possess some shared explanatory-level constitution. It (...)
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  40. Truthmaking for Modal Skeptics.Jamin Asay - 2013 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (4):303-312.
    Standard truthmaker theory has generally assumed a realist account of de re modality and essences. But there are reasons to be skeptical about such a view, and for considering antirealist alternatives. Can truthmaker theory survive in the face of such skepticism? I argue that it can, but that only certain antirealist perspectives on de re modality are acceptable for truthmaker theory. In particular, either a quasi-realist or conventionalist account of de re modality is needed to provide the best account of (...)
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  41. Incest, Incest Avoidance, and Attachment: Revisiting the Westermarck Effect.Robert A. Wilson - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (3):391-411.
    This article defends a version of the Westermarck Effect, integrating existing clinical, biological, and philosophical dimensions to incest avoidance. By focusing on care-based attachment in primates, my formulation of the effect suggests the power of a phylogenetic argument widely accepted by primatologists but not by cultural anthropologists. Identifying postadoption incest as a phenomenon with underexplored evidential value, the article sketches an explanatory strategy for reconciling the effect with the clinical reality of incest, concluding with an explicit argument against culture-first or (...)
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  42. What Achilles Did and the Tortoise Wouldn't.Catherine Legg - manuscript
    This paper offers an expressivist account of logical form, arguing that in order to fully understand it one must examine what valid arguments make us do (or: what Achilles does and the Tortoise doesn’t, in Carroll’s famed fable). It introduces Charles Peirce’s distinction between symbols, indices and icons as three different kinds of signification whereby the sign picks out its object by learned convention, by unmediated indication, and by resemblance respectively. It is then argued that logical form is represented by (...)
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  43. Versions of disorders we aspire to explain - nominal, conventional, and factual features.Peter Zachar - forthcoming - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Work on causation in psychopathology often emphasizes variation in the causes but variation in what is to be explained further complicates matters. Focusing on the protean nature of psychopathology, this chapter explores different ways that classificatory variation is generated. For example, choices about what features of disorders to foreground and background can produce variation. The chapter also examines, from the perspective of scientific conventionalism, how classificatory decisions made at choice points partly constitute what is classified, but not in the (...)
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  44. Hobbes, Definitions, and Simplest Conceptions.Marcus P. Adams - 2014 - Hobbes Studies 27 (1):35-60.
    Several recent commentators argue that Thomas Hobbes’s account of the nature of science is conventionalist. Engaging in scientific practice on a conventionalist account is more a matter of making sure one connects one term to another properly rather than checking one’s claims, e.g., by experiment. In this paper, I argue that the conventionalist interpretation of Hobbesian science accords neither with Hobbes’s theoretical account in De corpore and Leviathan nor with Hobbes’s scientific practice in De homine and elsewhere. Closely tied to (...)
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  45. Actualist Meaning Objectivism.Maria Elisabeth Reicher - 2013 - Proceedings of the European Society of Aesthetics.
    ABSTRACT. In this paper, I defend a strong version of actual intentionalism. First, I argue against meaning subjectivism, conventionalism and contextualism. Second, I discuss what I take to be the most important rival to actual intentionalism, namely hypothetical intentionalism. I argue that, although hypothetical intentionalism might be acceptable as a definition of the concept of utterance meaning, it does not provide an acceptable answer to the question of what determines an utterance’s meaning. Third, I deal with the most serious (...)
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  46. Convencionalismo e Naturalismo em Rousseau.Heitor Pagliaro - 2013 - Dissertation, Universidade Federal de Goiás
    This dissertation investigates the concept of law in Rousseau, analyzing if he defends the idea of natural law or if he is a conventionalist. Some commentators, like Robert Derathé, conceive Rousseau as a naturalist, as opposed to others, like Charles Vaughan, who think that he is a conventionalist. Here we will critically assess those positions and try to see if they exclude each other or if Rousseau can be read, somehow, as defending fundamental aspects of those two positions.
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  47. Let the ruler be the ruler.Liam D. Ryan - 2022 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2).
    How should we understand the Confucian doctrine of the rectification of names (zhengming): what does it mean that an object’s name must be in accordance with its reality, and why does it matter? The aim of this paper is to answer this question by advocating a novel interpretation of the later Confucian, Xunzi’s account of the doctrine. Xunzi claims that sage-kings ascribe names and values to objects by convention, and since they are sages, they know the truth. When we misuse (...)
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  48. Kaila's interpretation of Einstein-Minkowski invariance theory.Matias Slavov - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 93 (3):57-65.
    This essay explores Kaila's interpretation of the special theory of relativity. Although the relevance of his work to logical empiricism is well-known, not much has been written on what Kaila calls the ‘Einstein-Minkowski invariance theory’. Kaila's interpretation focuses on two salient features. First, he emphasizes the importance of the invariance of the spacetime interval. The general point about spacetime invariance has been known at least since Minkowski, yet Kaila applies his overall tripartite theory of invariances to space, time and spacetime (...)
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  49. Can We Be Skeptical About A Priori Knowledge?Sherif Salem -
    In this paper, we present a dialectical argument for a priori skepticism (i.e. the thesis that we can be skeptical about a priori knowledge). Then, we propose a framework that combines elements from inferential contextualism and logical conventionalism to offer a weak transcendental argument against a priori skepticism.
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  50. Rules to Infinity: The Normative Role of Mathematics in Scientific Explanation.Mark Povich - 2024 - Oxford University Press USA.
    [EDIT: This book will be published open access. Production is taking longer than expected but I will post the link to the whole book, hopefully by October.] One central aim of science is to provide explanations of natural phenomena. What role(s) does mathematics play in achieving this aim? How does mathematics contribute to the explanatory power of science? Rules to Infinity defends the thesis, common though perhaps inchoate among many members of the Vienna Circle, that mathematics contributes to the explanatory (...)
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