🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov17.092016.28202@news.unige.ch>
swann@divsun.unige.ch (SWANN Philip) writes:

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

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

PS:
>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".

This is a silly objection.  Surely non-trivial synonymy obtains
between syntactically different expressions; hence to adduce
syntactical difference as evidence of corresponding difference in
meaning is to beg the question against the possibility of synonymy.
On a deeper level, I am content to reiterate Church's solution to
Mates' puzzle: the mere possibility of doubt concerning identity of
meaning does not entail its difference.

PS:
>		  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.

Even granting your alleged ability, it is obvious that it does nothing
to exclude the context-dependent theories of meaning.  Think in terms
of _ceteris paribus_.

PS:
>	     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?).

Contextual considerations make the difference non-trivial; aside from
that, there is no _a priori_ need to limit the notion of synonymy to
single-language domains.  The best NL examples are furnished by good
translations.

>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. 

Following Montague, I believe that deicticaly disambiguated natural
languages *are* formal languages.

So who teaches philosophy in the University of Geneva, besides Jean
Starobinski?  Does it have a decent school of formal philosophy,
linguistics, logic, or mathematics?

cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
"Le cul des femmes est monotone comme l'esprit des hommes."