Cognitive synonymy is a type of

synonym A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words ''begin'', ''start'', ''commence'', and ''initiate'' are al ...

y in which synonyms are so similar in meaning that they cannot be differentiated either denotatively or connotatively, that is, not even by mental associations,

connotation A connotation is a commonly understood cultural or emotional association that any given word or phrase carries, in addition to its explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation. A connotation is frequently described as either positive ...

s, emotive responses, and poetic value. It is a stricter (more precise) technical definition of synonymy, specifically for theoretical (e.g.,

linguistic Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

and

philosophical Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...

) purposes. In

usage The usage of a language is the ways in which its written and spoken variations are routinely employed by its speakers; that is, it refers to "the collective habits of a language's native speakers", as opposed to idealized models of how a languag ...

employing this definition, synonyms with greater differences are often called near-synonyms rather than synonyms (compare also plesionyms).

Overview

If a word is cognitively synonymous with another word, they refer to the same thing independently of

context Context may refer to: * Context (language use), the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation, and discourse summary Computing * Context (computing), the virtual environment required to s ...

. Thus, a word is cognitively synonymous with another word

if and only if In logic and related fields such as mathematics and philosophy, "if and only if" (shortened as "iff") is a biconditional logical connective between statements, where either both statements are true or both are false. The connective is bic ...

all instances of both words express the same exact thing, and the referents are necessarily identical, which means that the words' interchangeability is not context-sensitive.

Willard Van Orman Quine Willard Van Orman Quine (; known to his friends as "Van"; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century" ...

used the concept of cognitive synonymy extensively in his famous 1951 paper " Two Dogmas of Empiricism", where two words were cognitively synonymous if they were interchangeable in every possible instance. For example, * All bachelors are unmarried men. * All unmarried men are not married. Quine notes that if one is referring to the word itself, this doesn't apply, as in, * ''Bachelor'' has fewer than ten letters. As compared to the substitution which is obviously false, * "Unmarried men" has less than ten letters.

Overview

See also

References

Further reading