Conventionality objection

What we have, then, is a pair of objections — I ll call them the incoherence objection and the conventionality objection — that must be met whatever else is said about the causal powers of the mental. 

So, to sum up (i) functional reduction is not economical reduction functional properties cannot be reduced to realizer properties even in the most favorable, single-realizer scenarios. (2) Microbased properties cannot be economically reduced to (any of) their supervenience base properties. (3) The exclusion argument can be reformulated in terms of a notion of supervenience that permits properties of wholes to supervene on properties of parts, and this puts higher-level, microbased properties into competition with their lower-level constituent properties. Finally, (4) the incoherence and conventionality objections can be mounted against any and all properties that have not been economically reduced. 

In earlier work. I ve advocated a radical response to the exclusion argument in the case of multiply realizable properties embrace the disjunctive solution.This is the move that identifies — and thereby economically reduces - the multiply realizable, higher-order property with the disjunctive property formed by taking the alternation of all first-order (total) realizer properties. If I can persuade you that some disjunctive properties are nomic, then I ll have a solution to the incoherence problem. And if I can provide some plausible principles to distinguish objectively nomic from objectively nonnomic disjunctive properties, then I ll have a solution to the conventionality objection as well. 

The section on Pictures in Art explains the difficulties that arise when an account of pictorial representation is extended from a consideration of scientific objects to objects represented in art. The section on Representing Molecules returns to the representation of spatial relations between atoms showing how, in systems of molecular representation after the time of Dalton, the spatial relations between atoms were sometimes shown in ways that were, on the account given in this chapter, pictorial, as was the case with van t Hoff s representations of the geometries of carbon atoms using solid tetrahedra. Later, schematic methods of spatial representation were developed, such as the Fischer projection, which conventionalized the representation of spatial relationships. 

---