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    The notion of synonymy cannot be given serious explanator... — Carmelics
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    The notion of synonymy cannot be given serious explanatory grounding

    Philosophy of Language
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    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Behaviorist accounts of meaning (Quine's 'stimulus meaning') show that synonymy cannot be defined without smuggling in intensional notions the physicalist must reject.
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    • 2.Attempts to ground synonymy in interchangeability salva veritate fail in intensional contexts, since such contexts presuppose the very modal or cognitive distinctions synonymy was meant to explain.
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    • 3.Quine's indeterminacy of translation thesis shows that no fact of the matter fixes synonymy relations between expressions, even in principle, undermining any naturalistic grounding.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Putnam's twin-earth cases demonstrate that competent speakers can use terms identically in all behavioral respects yet diverge in extension, severing synonymy from any accessible epistemic grounding.
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    • 2.If synonymy requires sameness of intension but intension is individuated by impossible-to-verify facts about reference across possible worlds, then synonymy exceeds any explanatory framework available to finite cognizers.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Synonymy can only be explained by appeal to notions such as definition, intension, possibility, and contradiction
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    • 2.Each of those notions stands in as much need of explanation as synonymy itself
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    • 3.The circle of mutual definability among these terms is too small to provide genuine explanatory grounding
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    Related

    Attempts to ground synonymy in interchangeability salva veritate fail in intensi...Behaviorist accounts of meaning (Quine's 'stimulus meaning') show that synonymy ...Each of those notions stands in as much need of explanation as synonymy itselfIf synonymy requires sameness of intension but intension is individuated by impo...
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    Putnam's twin-earth cases demonstrate that competent speakers can use terms iden...Quine's indeterminacy of translation thesis shows that no fact of the matter fix...Synonymy can only be explained by appeal to notions such as definition, intensio...The circle of mutual definability among these terms is too small to provide genu...

    Similar

    Each of those notions stands in as much need of explanation as synonym...86%The ordinary-language conception of synonymity conceals a range of exp...86%A stronger, finer-grained notion of synonymy than L-equivalence is nee...85%Different theoretical purposes may demand different levels of granular...84%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: analytic-synthetic
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    Quine addressed this issue, first, in his (1953 [1980a], chapter 3), and then in a much larger way in his (1960, chapter 2, and 1974) and related articles. In his (1953 [1980a]) he pressed his objection to analyticity further to the very ideas of synonymy and the linguistic meaning of an expression, on which, we saw, Frege’s criterion of analyticity crucially relied. His objection is that he sees no way to make any serious explanatory sense of them. He explored plausible explanations in terms of
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit