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—(i) the super-task argument and (ii) the regress argument— and argue that while these arguments together refute implausible explicit versions of conventionalism, they cannot ...

Abstract We provide five rearticulations of the thesis that structure spacetime is conventional, rather than empirically determined, based upon variation structures are underdetermined and modal contexts in which this underdetermination occurs. Three formulations conventionalism will be found to fail. Two open up new interesting problems for researchers foundations general relativity. In all ca...

Abstract In what sense is the direction of time a matter convention? The Direction Time , Hans Reichenbach makes brief reference to parallels between his views about status time’s and conventionalism geometry. this article, I: (1) provide conventionalist account motivated by number Reichenbach’s claims in book; (2) show how forwards backwards can give equivalent descriptions world despite forme...

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...

Plan: I: Some facts about logical necessity stated. II: Not all necessity is logical. III: The need for an explanation. IV: Formalists attempt unsuccessfully to reduce logic to syntax. V: The no-sense theory of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus merely reformulates the problem. VI: Crude conventionalism is circular. VII: Extreme conventionalism is more sophisticated. VIII: It yields some important insigh...

Davidson advocates a radical and powerful form of anti-conventionalism, on which the scope of a semantic theory is restricted to the most local of contexts: a particular utterance by a particular speaker. I argue that this hyper-localism undercuts the explanatory grounds for his assumption that semantic meaning is systematic, which is central, among other things, to his holism. More importantly...

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...