Abstrakt
What is conventionalism? Basically, it is a thesis about empirical underdetermination. According to Conventionalists, there is a slack " between the experience and theories to be " lined " with conventions.
As the experience does not " impose " any theory, scientists are always free to choose a theory on " soft " non-evidential grounds when facing. As Edouard Le Roy once put it succinctly: le conventionnalisme est une philosophie de la liberté.
Yet the thing to remember is that there is no such a thing as the conventionalism. Reasons for empirical underdetermination that Conventionalists state are not always the same, hence it is more convenient to talk about varieties of conventionalism.
The first part of the thesis it an attempt to sketch a line between two basic variants of conventionalism which are instrumentalism and constructivism. According to the Instrumentalists, the role of language in knowledge is passive; according to the Constructivists, it is active.
The second part of the thesis introduces the idea of meta-conventionalism. Meta-conventionalism is a conventionalism which ascends on the level of theories of meaning and theories of knowledge; an another application of " conventionalist stratagem ".
Meta-conventionalism is concerned, on the one hand, with the reasons for the choice of a theory of meanings and relations between theories of meaning and theories of knowledge, on the other. It is up to theoreticians to choose a theory of meaning.
The choice is free, yet it is substantial. It is the choice whether languages will play an active or a passive role in knowledge.
Meta-conventionalism is the thesis according to which languages can play an active or a passive role in knowledge if theoreticians decide so.