Online research in philosophy

The use of lexical concepts in Levelt et al.'s model requires further refinement with regard to syntactic factors in lexical choice, the prevention of pleonasm, and the representation of near-synonyms within and across languages.

This book explores how some word meanings are paradigmatically related to each other, for example, as opposites or synonyms, and how they relate to the mental organization of our vocabularies. Traditional approaches claim that such relationships are part of our lexical knowledge (our "dictionary" of mentally stored words) but Lynne Murphy argues that lexical relationships actually constitute our "metalinguistic" knowledge. The book draws on a century of previous research, including word association experiments, child language, and the use of synonyms and antonyms in text.

W. V. O. Quine's well-known attack upon the analytic-synthetic distinction is held to affect only one of the two species of analytic statements he distinguishes. In particular it is not directed at and does not affect the so-called logical truths. In this paper the scope of Quine's attack is extended so as to embrace the logical truths as well. It is shown that the unclarifiability of the notion of 'synonymy' deprives us not only of "analytic statements that are obtainable from logical truths by the replacement of synonyms with synonyms" but of "logical truths" themselves.