In approaching this task, we might begin with the four schools of moral philosophy distinguished earlier: utilitarian, virtue ethics, deontological, and
conventionalist. But instead of treating them as competing accounts of morality, each complete in and of itself, we might instead take them as different types of normativity, which are relatively autonomous from one another conceptually but often intertwined in reality.
(9) On such criticism of a
conventionalist concept of the meaning of works, see, for instance, Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation 42-3; Tolhurst, "On What a Text Is" 4-5; Stecker, "Apparent, Implied, and Postulated Authors" 261-2; and Levinson, "Intention and Interpretation" 247.
In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, the choice between such aims was left, by Popper, as a matter of decision--just because he saw that it was quite possible for someone to espouse a
conventionalist view of knowledge (that is, it could be done without inconsistency), which contrasted with his own preferred approach (which might be called aspirational realism: that science should aim for realist knowledge about the world).
Originalists might object that original meaning would be a more effective focal point than the permissive
conventionalist understanding of the text.
A great deal of the culture of Campus
Conventionalist logic is concerned with power.
In sum, I am not persuaded by any of Professor Merrill's normative arguments that we should be
conventionalists rather than textualists or originalists in constitutional interpretation.
In
conventionalist terms, this history illustrates two technologies--one medical and one social--co-evolving.
At the outset, it must be conceded that the
conventionalists do not explicitly extend their view to the issue of remedies for negligence.
He is too caught up in polemical skirmishes (between
conventionalists and anticonventionalists) that are surely of only passing interest.
When Lovecraft's protagonists recoil from the terrible truths they have stumbled upon, they stand for the affronted
conventionalists and religious believers who still balk at the revelations of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud.
To
conventionalists like the author, the immediate cause is presumably incompetent experimental technique.
I fear that the body-mind is more subtle and complex than we
conventionalists were trained to believe.