ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 12
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| 3. Interchangeability (cont.)
|
| The question remains whether interchangeability
| 'salva veritate' (apart from occurrences within words)
| is a strong enough condition for synonymy, or whether,
| on the contrary, some heteronymous expressions might be thus
| interchangeable. Now let us be clear that we are not concerned
| here with synonymy in the sense of complete identity in psychological
| associations or poetic quality; indeed no two expressions are synonymous
| in such a sense. We are concerned only with what may be called 'cognitive'
| synonymy. Just what this is cannot be said without successfully finishing the
| present study; but we know something about it from the need which arose for
| it in connection with analyticity in Section 1. The sort of synonymy needed
| there was merely such that any analytic statement could be turned into a
| logical truth by putting synonyms for synonyms. Turning the tables and
| assuming analyticity, indeed, we could explain cognitive synonymy of
| terms as follows (keeping to the familiar example): to say that
| "bachelor" and "unmarried man" are cognitively synonymous is
| to say no more or less than that the statement:
|
| (3) All and only bachelors are unmarried men
|
| is analytic.*
|
|*This is cognitive synonymy in a primary, broad sense. Carnap ([3],
| pp. 56ff) and Lewis ([2], pp. 83ff) have suggested how, once this
| notion is at hand, a narrower sense of cognitive synonymy which
| is preferable for some purposes can in turn be derived. But
| this special ramification of concept-building lies aside
| from the present purposes and must not be confused with
| the broad sort of cognitive synonymy here concerned.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", pp. 28-29.
|
| W.V. Quine,
|"Two Dogmas of Empiricism", 'Philosophical Review', January 1951.
| Reprinted as pages 20-46 in 'From a Logical Point of View',
| 2nd edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980.
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