โ Scribed by Tamara Horowitz
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Empiricists, especially twentieth-century empiricists, have typically accepted a certain conventionalist epistemological doctrine. The doctrine can be put as follows: The meaning of a predicate can be stipulated by definition. When this is done, the people who have given the def'mitions as well as anyone who understands the definitions come to have two epistemological privileges. They can know the truth of certain statements about the world "independently of experience," or "a priori," or "without empirical investigation." And they can know these statements to be true incorrigibly; that is, with a degree of assurance that no evidence gained by empirical observation could override. Both of these privileges supposedly result from the fact that if, say, I have stipulated that sets are to be called 'totally ordered' if and only if they have the properties G and H, I can then know that all totally ordered sets are G simply by reflecting upon my stipulative convention. This requires no empirical investigation, so I have the first privilege. All it does require is scrutiny of my own mental states, in this case my having mentally accepted a rule for applying a term, and all such judgments about one's own immediate mental states can be known incorrigibly according to the Cartesian tradition upon which empiricism was built. I shall call precisely the view I have just described "empiricist conventionalism."
It was also typical of empiricism to treat all meaningful predicates as though they had been stipulatively defined, so that the simple this-is-what-itmeans definitions of terms in a mathematics textbook were viewed as paradigm cases of linguistic conventions in general. This oversimplified conception of the system of conventions which give a term meaning in a natural language led empiricists to extend the epistemological privileges supposedly available in the case of stipulatively defined terms to the general case of all meaningful predicates, including such favorites as 'bachelor', which almost certainly was
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