ABSTRACT
Conventionalism, particularly in the treatment of scientific theories, has a long history, though a rather unclear meaning. A view of convention as somewhat more pervasive within a single discipline is that of Henri Poincare. Poincare took all of the axioms of geometry to be implicit definitions of “space” and thus conventional. W. V. O. Quine, at least in Mathematical Logic, regarded first order logic as conventionally true. The principle of charity invoked in Word and Object is also used to defend conventional two-valued, extensional, first order logic as the basic framework for human thought, or at least for human conversation. What the conventionalist suggests is rather, as is clear from what Poincare says about geometry, that it is factors of simplicity, convenience, even familiarity, that dictate the choice of one alternative over another. Let take the notion of conventionality as a starting point, and see how far convention permeates our scientific knowledge.
