ABSTRACT
In this section I will expound a famous epistemological critique of geometry by Henri Poincaré. His position is usually labeled a doctrine of geometric conventionalism, but as we shall see, understanding just what a conventionalist claim amounts to is far from trivial. Part 1 will outline Poincaré’s position, Part 2 will offer a reply to it originally formulated by Eddington and developed at great length by Reichenbach. (The conflict between the views of these two men and that of Poincaré forms the bulk of the investigations of [II,H].) Part 3 of this section will be a preliminary explanation of the meaning of conventionalist doctrine when it is extended beyond the conventionality of the metric features of spacetime into a doctrine of the conventionality of topological features. The treatment here will be quite brief, as I shall have to return to this question in some detail at a later point (IV, D,3).
