1. Cognitive synonymy: a dead parrot?
- Author
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Berto, Francesco and Hornischer, Levin
- Subjects
- *
REASON , *COMPOSITIONALITY (Linguistics) , *SEMANTICS , *DEFEASIBLE reasoning , *ALGEBRA - Abstract
Sentences φ and ψ are cognitive synonyms for one when they play the same role in one's cognitive life. The notion is pervasive (Sect. 1), but elusive: it is bound to be hyperintensional (Sect. 2), but excessive fine-graining would trivialize it and there are reasons for some coarse-graining (Sect. 2.1). Conceptual limitations stand in the way of a natural algebra (Sect. 2.2), and it should be sensitive to subject matters (Sect. 2.3). A cognitively adequate individuation of content may be intransitive (Sect. 3) due to 'dead parrot' series: sequences of sentences φ 1 , ... , φ n where adjacent φ i and φ i + 1 are cognitive synonyms while φ 1 and φ n are not (Sect. 3.1). Finding an intransitive account is hard: Fregean equipollence won't do (Sect. 3.2) and a result by Leitgeb shows that it wouldn't satisfy a minimal compositionality principle (Sect. 3.3).Sed contra, there are reasons for transitivity, too (Sect. 3.4). In Sect. 4, we come up with a formal semantics capturing this jumble of desiderata, thereby showing that the notion is coherent. In Sect. 5, we re-assess the desiderata in its light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
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