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And Rosta scripsit: > Agnosticism isn't possible with synonymy. Either you believe two > words have the same sense, or you don't. In this instance, they > didn't. But I do. I'm not sure whether "you don't" means "you believe they have different senses" or merely "you ~ believe they have the same sense". > That's right. (it so happens that one of the few things I know about > these two words is that they denote the same thing.) You can conclude > that for you they are synonymous, unless there is strong evidence > from the rest of usage that they aren't generally recognized as > such, in which case you may create a superconcept that covers > them both, but continue to think of a woodchuck as a M. monax that > would chuck wood and of a groundhog as a M. monax that appears on my > birthday to foretell the coming weather. So synonymy is really a 3-place relationship between two terms and a believer, x1 is synonymous with x2 in the usage of x3? > As you recognize, cases like "square of 2" and, if it is understood > compositionally, "H2O" are not candidates for synonymy because they > have a compositional meaning. And it is clearly possible to believe > that 4 is not the square of 2. How is this fundamentally different from believing that furze is not gorse, or that "not" is not a mark of negation? > * Synonymy exists: we can have the knowledge "word X and word Y have > the same sense (whatever the sense is)". But this seems to be true iff we believe it, or more operationally, terms are synonymous for me iff I use them interchangeably. This makes hash of the distinction between de dicto and de re belief. -- Deshil Holles eamus. Deshil Holles eamus. Deshil Holles eamus. Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening, and wombfruit. (3x) Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! -- Joyce, _Ulysses_, "Oxen of the Sun" jcowan@hidden.email