Conventionalism is the philosophical attitude that fundamental principles of a certain kind are grounded on (explicit or implicit) agreements in society, rather than on external reality.
Although this attitude is commonly held with respect to the rules of grammar, its application to the propositions of ethics, law, science, biology, mathematics, and logic is more controversial.
He held that axioms in geometry should be chosen for the results they produce, not for their apparent coherence with – possibly flawed – human intuitions about the physical world.
[2] Duhem was skeptical that human perceptions are sufficient to understand the "true," metaphysical nature of reality and argued that scientific laws should be valued mainly for their predictive power and correspondence with observations.
In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, he defined a "conventionalist stratagem" as any technique that is used by a theorist to evade the consequences of a falsifying observation or experiment.
Such rules will serve as the sole source of information for all the community members because they demarcate clearly all the circumstances in which state coercion will and will not be exercised.
Fish claims that such mistake stems from their mistaken belief that there exists a general or higher 'theory' that explains or constrains all fields of activity like state coercion.