- What is convention?
- Conventionalism in philosophy
- Conventionalism in linguistics
- Social conventions
- Conventionalism and naturalism
We explain what conventionalism is in philosophy and linguistics. Also, social conventions and what is naturalism.
What is convention?
Conventionality is the belief, attitude or procedure that considers as true or valid only the principles, uses, traditions Y rules conventions that govern human behavior, that is, those that come from a convention: from some kind of implicit or explicit agreement of a group determined social.
Said in simpler terms, conventionalism implies the predominance of the established, of that which is accepted in one way or another by the social agreement, more or less equivalent to the formal or the instituted.
This term may well be applied to different areas of the knowledge, as the philosophy, the linguistics, the right, among others, preserving more or less the same meaning.
For example, in the field of law, convention establishes that institutions legal of a community they must contain clear social conventions on which to base the rules they promulgate.
Thus, convention makes it very clear to the whole population what will be the circumstances in which the Condition he will exercise his capacity for coercion. This theory was strongly defended by the American professor Ronald Dworkin (1931-2003).
Conventionalism in philosophy
In the realm of philosophy, conventionalism is a form of thought according to which all scientific theories and concepts are not really a reflection of the laws that govern the objective world (that is, the reality).
That is, it considers that the scientific knowledge It is the result of an agreement or a convention between the specialists in charge of preparing the speech scientist, based on his notions of comfort and simplicity.
In this sense, conventionalism is one of the forms of idealism subjective, that is, the denial of the objectivity of a subject's formal knowledge. The founder of this way of thinking was the French Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), who was also an important cultist of the math, physical and philosophy of science.
The school of the conventionalists, as opposed to the rationalists, gave concepts a privileged place in the order of thought, above the sensory experience of the world. They considered that the conditions that shape the world were first and foremost human.
This implies that everything observable depends directly on an internalized conceptual framework, prior even to the experience of things. In other words, before experiencing the world, we necessarily already have a category (a convention) that describes it and that shapes our experience of what it is.
Conventionalism in linguistics
In the field of study of language, we speak of conventionalism to refer to a current of the language philosophy, which defends the autonomy of the signifier with respect to the signified, that is, its arbitrariness.
Put more simply, this means that the relation that links the set of sounds which is a word (let's say: "tree") and the object that this word designates (the real tree, which is in the square) is totally artificial, responding to a convention and not to any kind of natural or spontaneous relationship.
In this sense, since the famous Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) published his General Linguistics CourseThe linguistics derived from it, of the Structuralist type, is also considered conventionalist.
Social conventions
The set of norms is known as social conventions, protocols or behaviors that make up the decorum, the label and good customs, especially those derived from moral bourgeoisie that became the norm after the Industrial Revolution.
Many of them, like those typical of the Victorian Era in England, were paradoxically the result of copying conventions from other nations, inventions and imaginations, which nonetheless served to produce a whole series of ideological conceptions and of the "virtuous life", controlling and sometimes censoring the behaviors considered immodest or slums.
Conventionalism and naturalism
In the field of linguistics, and more specifically that of the philosophy of language, there are two contrary positions regarding the origin of language and its forms:
- Conventionalism. As we have seen before, it assumes that the words come from the human creative act, that is, they are conventional, artificial and that the Linguistic sign it is, fundamentally, arbitrary. Something that could be summarized by saying that language is a convention.
- Naturalism. He argues that language arose as other features of the nature of living beings. For them the language in its beginnings was true, fair and clear, and with the passing of the years and the use of Humans we would have been degrading it or distancing it from its essence. This position is typical of classical antiquity, especially Hellenic, since it coincides with the basic assumptions of the religion of Ancient Greece. Cratylus (late 5th century BC) was one of its greatest defenders.