🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov16.120727.17500@husc3.harvard.edu>, zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:


> P.S.  Is anybody out there objecting to transitivity of synonymy?

I would object to the assumption that synonymy is a property of
human language. Trivially, if we believe that two expressions
"mean the same thing" then we have some meaningful criteria to
distinguish them and some reason for doing so and, unless you want
to multiply abstract entities endlessly, they therefore do not "mean
the same thing". More concretely, for any pair of human language
expressions that you claim to be synonymous in a given context, I
claim that I can produce another context in which they are not
synonymous. Finally, while genuine synonymes *might* exist as
transient phenomena in human language, surely one would quickly
be driven out by the other for simple reasons of efficiency (would
you want to keep two identical copies of the same procedure in
a program?).

Philip Swann

P.S Yes, of course I also object to such weird ideas as the
    transitivity of synonymy and meaning preserving transformations
    - insofar as you claim they apply to empirical phenemona in
    human language; in formal stuff you can do what you like and
    use any old labels you like.