If descriptions behaved like genuine proper names, substituting co-referring descriptions would always preserve cognitive significance, but 'the evening star is the morning star' remains empirically surprising.

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Cognitive significance(The standard being used to judge whether Collingwood's theory is legitimate): The quality of having meaningful content that tells us something real about the world or our thinking—basically, whether a statement actually *means* something.
co-referring(in philosophy of language): When two different words or phrases point to the exact same thing in the world—for example, 'the author of Romeo and Juliet' and 'Shakespeare' both refer to the same person.
descriptions(how ordinary people understand what proper names refer to): Phrases that pick out a person or thing by listing their qualities—like 'the tallest building in the world' instead of just saying 'Burj Khalifa.'
empirically surprising(in epistemology and philosophy of language): Something that catches you off guard based on observation or experience in the real world, rather than something you could figure out just by thinking about word definitions alone.

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