CONVENTIONALISM: PHILOSOPHICAL, LEGAL, SOCIAL, MORAL, POLITICAL - PHILOSOPHY - 2025

The conventionality is the philosophical attitude or belief that the fundamental principles, values, norms and customs of society are based on explicit or implied agreements of a social group, rather than external reality.

It is a concept applied in various fields such as grammar, ethics, legal, scientific and philosophical, among others. It constitutes a typical point of view of subjective idealism, since it denies the objective content of the subject's knowledge. Certain elements of conventionalism can be detected in positivism, especially in pragmatism and operationalism.

Henri Poincaré, considered the founder of conventionalism. Source: See page for author

Its application in such dissimilar areas makes it difficult to establish a single concept of conventionality. However, as a common factor in conventionalist theories, the free choice of a common agreement is implicit.

Hence, it is not the nature of things, rational considerations, universal characteristics, or factors of human cognition, but the agreement of a group that leads us to choose and adopt certain principles.

Conventionalism is sometimes considered a theory akin to constructivism, stating that the objects of investigation are not completely independent of the mind. In this sense the conventionalists affirm that certain truths that arise in our physical world, are questions of convention.

Likewise, in the case of knowledge that is in dispute, the convention prevails over objectivity, since what is true is not chosen, but what is more convenient or useful.

In philosophy

Conventionalism appears in almost all areas of philosophy, addressing issues such as property, morality, personal identity, ontology, necessity.

One of the main exponents, also considered the founder of this philosophical current, was the French mathematician Henri Poincaré (1854-1912). In his thinking is the very essence of conventionalism, since he considers that scientific concepts and theoretical constructions are the product of agreements between scientists, however, this does not mean that it lacks objective value.

The theories of space and time that are handled are two of the most famous examples of conventional truths, as Poincaré indicated at the time with Euclidean geometry. The mathematician broadly handles 4 theses around conventionalism:

- There are empirically arbitrary elements in science, conventions made by decision

- In science there are statements that, to function properly, need conventions.

- The epistemological status of scientific statements is not static, but depends on the decisions of the scientific community

- Negative results of hypothesis testing experiments are always ambiguous.

Social conventionalism

Conventionalism assumes that the fundamental principles are based on implicit or explicit agreements between social groups. Source: Pixabay

A social convention is a regular factor widely observed by some group of individuals. But not all regularities are conventions. The fact that everyone eats or sleeps is not a convention, but language or the use of money as a measure of exchange is.

The first signs of social conventionalism can be detected in the Treatise on Human Nature by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), which David K. Lewis (1941-2001) will later return to and deepen. For this, a convention is nothing more than a system of actions of common interest, that is, it prevails in a population when everyone assumes it for the mutual benefit that it entails.

Legal conventionalism

The conventionalist position holds that the fundamental legal fact is a convention, which exists only when human actions and attitudes intersect or relate to each other in a particular way.

In the legal field, conventionalism has developed from the ideas of English Herbert Hart (1907-1992). This philosopher of law argues as a necessary condition for the existence of a legal system, the management of a social practice among judges with respect to the identification of the law, known as the “rule of recognition”.

Another exponent of legal conventionality was Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013), who in his work Law's Empire considers that the legal institutions of a community should contain clear social conventions on which the rules that are promulgated can be based. These rules demarcate all the circumstances in which state coercion is exercised or not.

Moral conventionalism

Conventionalism, from the moral point of view, gives rise to relativism and is opposed to universalism. In this sense, moral truths result from social convention, so a crime in a particular society can be a routine or necessary element in another.

Thus, an action cannot be interpreted from a single perspective, but depends on the context, who, how and when it is presented.

A prominent thinker of moral conventionalism was the American philosopher, Gilbert Harman (1938-) who argues in his work The Nature of Morality that there is no single true morality, therefore, there are no objective moral facts and we do not need them to explain our judgments. moral.

Political conventionalism

The first signs of political conventionalism are detected in Ancient Greece, in the philosophical school of the Sophists. These thinkers considered that the origin of the law is man, not nature or the gods. This is how the opposing concepts nomos-physis are raised, understood respectively as custom or culture and the natural.

The sophists consider that all laws, customs, religious beliefs and political ideas are the product of an agreement between citizens to guarantee coexistence, that is, they are the will of man. Therefore, since they do not derive from nature, nor come from the divine will, they cannot be considered immutable or universal.

The contact with other cultures, through the commercial relations and the colonial expansion of the Greeks, as well as their political experience, were key factors for the sophists to raise the idea that customs and laws are human creations.

The conformation of the nomos leads to the construction of a political subject, the demos, which is artificially constituted by equal men and implies the acceptance of a mandatory law, established by common agreement.

References

1. Wikipedia contributors. (2019, November 2). Conventionalism. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Recovered from wikipedia.org
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3. Rescorla, M. Convention. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Issue), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Retrieved from plato.stanford.edu
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5. Iglesias, G. (2014) Conventionalism. Encyclopedia Legal and Social Sciences. Recovered from leyderecho.org
6. "Constructivism and Conventionalism" Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Recovered from Encyclopedia.com