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From: unbent@ecsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: About synonymy
Message-ID: <2219@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 31-Mar-84 10:53:29 EST
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.2219
Posted: Sat Mar 31 10:53:29 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 1-Apr-84 07:37:16 EST
Lines: 32

==>
	As usual, let's have some distinctions.  I think the
one we need today is the type/token distinction.  Regardez:

	(1)	sheep		sheep

How many *words* on line (1)?  If you answer "two", then
you're counting word *tokens*; if you answer "one word,
repeated twice", then you're counting word *types*.
	Traditional questions regarding "synonymy" are
concerned with word *types*, not with word *tokens*.  "How a
word *looks*" is concerned with features of word *tokens*--
ergo, has nothing to tell us about synonymy.  Notice, for
example, that tokens of the *Latin* sentence "Jam dies" ("It
is day", I think) look just like tokens of the *English*
sentence "Jam dies" (a comment on the mortality of preserves).
	If you require intersubstitutivity preserving "all
appreciable states of the reader" for synonymy, you're not
going to find any synonyms.  As any poet knows, *affective*
states of the readers aren't preserved under type-
substitutions.  Traditionally, however, synonymy requires only
that "meaning" be preserved.  There's lots of philosophical
debate about what that might entail, but here, at least,
you'll find some plausible *candidates*:  'too' and 'also',
for example, or 'optometrist' and 'eye doctor'.  (Those are
intra-linguistic examples.  Inter-linguistic examples might
get one even closer.)

Yours for clearer concepts,       --Jay Rosenberg
				    Dept. of Philosophy
...mcnc!ecsvax!unbent		    Univ. of North Carolina
				    Chapel Hill, NC  27514