Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

However, using these would lead to trivialities like The meaning of 'Every farmer' is the meaning of 'every farmer' 'Every farmer owns a donkey' means that every farmer owns a donkey We may, of course, also say something less trivial, e.g. 'Every farmer owns a donkey' means that for every x, if x is a farmer, then x owns a donkey; however, what is nontrivial with this is the purported synonymy of 'Every farmer owns a donkey' and 'For every x, if x is a farmer, then x owns a donkey'; i.e. the fact that the latter is - in a certain sense - a faithful translation of the former.

And if we use another sentence on the right hand side of the biconditional, then it is the purported synonymy of this sentence with the characterized sentence which is nontrivial.

Meaning vs. Synonymy Semantics is by definition the matter of the vertical relations linking expressions to their extralinguistic meanings.

These relations amount to similarity and dissimilarity of meaning, their most clear-cut representative being the relation of synonymy.

However, what is synonymy, if it is not the linkage to the same object?

Expressions which are usable to the same effect have equal values, they are equivalent; and synonymy is primarily just this kind of equivalence.

The semiotic view is based on the assumption that what is primary are the vertical relations, and that the horizontal relations of synonymy or of likeness and difference in meaning are mere auxiliaries which help us speak about those that are vertical.

We may say that meanings owe their existence to synonymy, that they are 'reifications' of synonymy; in the sense of Quine's (1992) 'there is no existence without equivalence'.

But what we are going to argue for here is a much less trivial thesis: that meanings are 'reifications' of relations much more elementary than that of synonymy, in the paradigmatic case of the opposition between truth and falsity.

Two Approaches to Language Revisited The concept of meaning is trivially interrelated with that of synonymy: if we have meaning we eo ipso have synonymy ('sameness of meaning'), and if we have synonymy we eo ipso have meaning ('value shared by 84 synonymous expressions').