Macdonald Before Quine on Truth by Convention

ABSTRACT I show that Margaret Macdonald anticipated Quine's well‐known criticisms of logical conventionalism in her unpublished 1934 PhD thesis, but that she later developed her criticisms in a direction distinct from that of Quine under the influence of Wittgenstein. Macdonald rejected as senseless the suggestion that statements of logical truth admit of justification, through an examination of the use to which such statements are put in ordinary speech.