Abstract

In his essay "on likeness of meaning" nelson goodman proposed that two terms have the same meaning if and only if they have the same primary and secondary extensions. In a later essay "on some differences about meaning" he reformulates his proposal: two terms have the same meaning if and only if they have the same extension and certain of their parallel compounds have the same extension. First, I argue that because the first but not the second formulation allows for interlinguistic meaning comparisons, Goodman proposed two theories on synonymy rather than one. Second, I argue that the first theory suffers from the fatal defect of entailing that any two coextensive terms are synonymous