Conventionalism

In Kathrin Koslicki & Michael J. Raven (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 437-454 (2024)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Conventionalism about essence is the view that truths about what is (and isn’t) essential to things are based upon talk and thought about the world, rather than mind-independent facts. This chapter presents motivations for conventionalism, and explains how conventionalism can be (and has been) developed to accommodate essences that can only be discovered with the help of empirical investigation, like “water is H2O” or “Obama is human”. We examine a range of objections that have been raised against conventionalism—often presented dismissively and decisively—and show how conventionalism has ample resources with which to plausibly respond to these challenges.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

    This entry is not archived by us. If you are the author and have permission from the publisher, we recommend that you archive it. Many publishers automatically grant permission to authors to archive pre-prints. By uploading a copy of your work, you will enable us to better index it, making it easier to find.

    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 101,601

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Conventionalism.Yemima Ben-Menahem - 2006 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Conventionalism Revisited.Bogdan Ciomaga - 2012 - Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 6 (4):410-422.
Logical Conventionalism.Jared Warren - unknown - In Filippo Ferrari, Elke Brendel, Massimiliano Carrara, Ole Hjortland, Gil Sagi, Gila Sher & Florian Steinberger (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Logic. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
On some standard objections to mathematical conventionalism.Severin Schroeder - 2017 - Belgrade Philosophical Annual 30 (30):83-98.
Conventionalism and contingency in promissory powers.Andrew Lichter - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (5-6):1769-1792.

Analytics

Added to PP
2024-06-11

Downloads
57 (#382,705)

6 months
33 (#114,991)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author Profiles

Jonathan Livingstone-Banks
University of Oxford
Alan Sidelle
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references