Conventionalism

Certain fundamental philosophical disputes, in contrast to disputes in the empirical sciences, are characterized by the persistence of disagreement. This has led some to endorse conventionalism, the view that the 'facts of the matter' partly depend on our conventions and that disagreements persist because both sides to the dispute employ different conventions. What does it mean to say that the facts of the matter partly depend on conventions? My thesis is concerned with this question. It has four parts. Part I ('Convention, Dependence, Covariance') examines how some matters of fact may depend on convention. I argue that while versions of conventionalism which can be construed in terms of one of the familiar dependence-relations are intuitively plausible, most interesting versions of conventionalism (about, say, ontology, modality and morality) cannot be so construed. To maintain the claim that some range of facts depends on convention, conventionalists need to explain how the features they take to be conventionally determined systematically covary with conventions. Part II ('A Framework for Conventionalist Reasoning') provides the formal tools to model conventionalist dependence-relations, tools that respect the methodological assumptions of conventionalists and reflect the logic of conventionalist discourse.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2003

Author dc:creator

• Einheuser, Iris, 1969-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stephen Yablo.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/17648
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/17648

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/17648