Prerequisite: What is "conservative accounting? It is the practice of recording and presenting financial statements based on cautious principles such as "acquisition cost or market value whichever is lower" (instead of the presently favored "fair value", frequently based on the subjective overvaluation of assets or undervaluation of debts) and "recognizing profits only after realizing sales", etc. If "philosophy" is meant in the professional sense (i.e., not merely as an "attitude"), one comes to the following conclusion:

A "conservative accounting philosophy" is an ontology and epistemology that tries to justify conservative accounting by taking into consideration: (1) the volatility of values (in general, but particularly, of assets, equities, etc.), and (2) that these values should be represented in a "prudent" and objective rather than an "optimistic" and subjective way..

A financial value is not a property of something but a three-way relation between some (i) person(s), (ii) an object, and (iii) changeable circumstances. This implies a potential for sudden or unexpected fluctuations in value such that its representation at one moment of time may no longer correspond to the reality at another moment. This creates a dilemma. On one side, accounting and financial statements are supposed to represent "reality", on the other side, this reality is in constant flux. Hence, neither a "conservative" value nor a "fair" value satisfies the ontological quest posed by a realist ontology. One solution to this problem would be to supplement accounting values of the financial statements with some kind of error estimates (e.g., its standard deviation), or to use a "multiple value approach." Proposals of this kind have been made in the literature (e.g., in Mattessich's Accounting and Analytical Methods, 1964: 220-231) but have not been seriously considered by