Neo-Conventionalist Accounts of Necessity

Conventionalism about necessity was deemed hopeless for a long time. The philosophical landscape, however, is shifting now with recent work in modal metaphysics locating the source of necessity in some kind of convention, albeit non-linguistic. Modal neo-conventionalists claim that a proposition is necessary just when it is true and is classified as such as a matter of convention. But what is the function of adopting a convention about necessity? And what are these conventions that distinguish what is possible from what is impossible, anyway? In this paper, I first offer an elucidation of the two accounts of neo-conventionalism, which I call 'worlds-based neo-conventionalism' and 'axiom-based neo-conventionalism'. Then, I discuss a number of pressing questions that modal neo-conventionalism faces. The moral is that neo-conventionalists have some work to do in order for the account to be explanatorily satisfactory

Convention · Conventionalism · Economics · Epistemology · Metaphysics · Modal · Social science · Sociology · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science

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