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Designation and Convention: A Chapter of Early Logical Empiricism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Thomas A. Ryckman
Thomas A. Ryckman*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
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Extract

We have yet to fully understand the mariner or the measure to which logical empiricism emerged as a conventionalist response to both traditional Kantian and empiricist epistemology and to the apparent triumphs of “conventionalist stratagems” (in Popper’s aspersive locution) in the foundations of science. By “conventionalism”, however, is here understood a broader sense than customary, an extrapolation of views on the foundations of geometry and physics (associated in the first instance with Poincaré“) to an encompassing epistemological consideration of the development and validity of scientific concepts generally. In this new construal, the concepts of science are neither derivable from sense experience, nor are they transcendentally valid a priori conditions of its possibility. Rather they are “free creations of the human mind” whose provenance is “logically arbitrary”, as Poincare’ and (subsequently) Einstein put it.

Type
Part IV. History of Philosophy of Science
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1990 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1990 , 1990 , pp. 149 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1991

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Footnotes

1

I wish to thank Michael Friedman and Thomas Uebel for comments and criticisms of previous drafts, and Alan Richardson for preliminary discussions on these matters.

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