Conventionalism facts for kids
Conventionalism is a way of thinking that says some basic rules or ideas are based on agreements people make in society. These agreements can be clear or unspoken. It's not about how the world truly is, but about what we decide together.
Think about the rules of a game. They aren't "true" in nature, but we agree on them so we can play. Conventionalism suggests that some ideas in areas like language, science, or even law work in a similar way.
Contents
Language Rules
People have debated how language works for a long time. Is a word's meaning naturally connected to what it describes, or do we just agree on what it means?
Most modern experts on language, like Ferdinand de Saussure, believe that the connection between a word and its meaning is mostly based on agreement. For example, there's no natural reason why a four-legged animal that barks is called a "dog" in English and "perro" in Spanish. We just agree on it.
Math Rules
The French mathematician Henri Poincaré was one of the first to talk about conventionalism in math. He worked with different kinds of geometry, not just the one taught in school (Euclidean geometry).
Poincaré realized that the basic rules (called axioms) in geometry aren't necessarily "true" in the real world. Instead, he thought we choose these rules because they help us get useful results. It's like picking the best tools for a job, rather than saying one tool is the only "true" one.
How We Know Things (Epistemology)
Some thinkers, like Alfred Jules Ayer and Carl Hempel, applied conventionalism to math and logic. They believed that truths in math and logic aren't facts about the world. Instead, they are true because of how we define things and the rules we set up.
Another French philosopher, Pierre Duhem, thought conventionalism applied to all of science. He believed that humans can't truly understand the deep, hidden nature of reality. So, he argued that scientific laws are valuable mainly because they help us predict things and match what we observe.
Saving Ideas from Being Wrong
The philosopher Karl Popper talked about something called a "conventionalist trick." This is when someone tries to protect their ideas or theories from being proven wrong by observations or experiments.
Popper identified a few ways people do this:
- Adding a new, quick explanation that makes the evidence against their idea seem unimportant.
- Changing the definitions of words in their theory so it fits the new evidence.
- Saying that the person doing the experiment isn't reliable.
- Claiming that the observations that challenge the theory don't matter.
- Suggesting that the person who can't save the theory isn't smart enough.
Popper argued that it's very important to avoid these tricks. If you don't, you can never truly test if a scientific idea is right or wrong.
Different Ways of Thinking
In the 1930s, a Polish philosopher named Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz came up with "radical conventionalism." He thought that there are different ways of thinking and talking about the world (like different "languages" or "conceptual tools") that can't be perfectly translated into each other.
He believed that all our knowledge, even what we see and hear, depends on which of these "languages" we choose to use. So, there's always a choice or agreement involved in what we know. Later, he changed his mind a bit, but his ideas were important.
Rules in Law
Conventionalism also applies to how we think about law. The American legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin described it as one way to understand law.
According to Dworkin's idea of conventionalism, a community's laws should be based on clear social agreements. These rules would be the only source of information for everyone, clearly showing when the government can use its power and when it cannot.
However, Dworkin argued that this idea doesn't quite fit with reality. He pointed out that there are many times when there aren't clear, existing legal rules for every situation. Because of this, he felt that conventionalism couldn't fully explain why the government has the right to use its power. Dworkin himself preferred a different idea called "law as integrity."
See also
In Spanish: Convencionalismo para niños
- French historical epistemology
- Émile Boutroux
Sources
- The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Henri Poincaré
- "Pierre Duhem". Notes by David Huron
- Mary Jo Nye, "The Boutroux Circle and Poincare's Conventionalism," Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 40, No. 1. (Jan. – Mar., 1979), pp. 107–120.
