Synonymy and Contextual Dependence

As is widely known, synonymy is a common phenomenon in everyday language and can generally be defined, not as identity, but as similarity in meaning. Speakers of historical-natural languages can fully recognize the shared meaning between two words. However, the possibility of substituting words with similar meanings within the same proposition cannot disregard the differences and individual variations influenced by personal experiences. This paper aims to explore synonymy as an experimentum crucis for the argument that knowledge of the conventional meaning of expressions alone is insufficient to determine the proposition expressed. Instead, it must be supplemented with contextual information. From this perspective, the necessary reference to context can contribute to renewing and, in a certain sense, expanding the concepts of meaning, truth conditions, and semantic content from a pragmatic viewpoint. Semantic conventions, therefore, are inadequate to fully determine the propositional content of a sentence. Consequently, the traditional distinction between semantics and pragmatics needs to be re-evaluated in light of how linguistic expressions are understood and used by speakers.