On Two Kinds of Conventionalism with Respect to Empirical Sciences

Abstract

There are a lot of misunderstandings about various methodological and philosophical attitudes usually labeled as ‘conventionalist’. Most of these misunderstandings stem — I think — from, first, a lack of distinction between particular types of conventionalism which leads to the employment of very vague notions like ‘moderate’ or ‘radical’ conventionalism, etc. However, rarely does one distinguish a methodological position according to which some or all statements of empirical sciences are not univocally determined by experience from a philosophical attitude according to which some or all statements of empirical sciences are neither true nor false sentences in a classical sense, but serve as means of classifying and predicting the facts.