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    Carmelics

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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The notion of synonymy cannot be given serious explanatory grounding

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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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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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 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 against 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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