Overview

Aristotle makes use of the concepts of homonymy and synonymy in various contexts, such as detecting ambiguity in dialectical arguments, formulating preliminary scientific definitions, and describing relations among existing things. But he comes to the point of giving definitions of the concepts only once, and this occurs in the first chapter of the Categories. It seems reasonable, then, to begin the examination of homonymy with the account Aristotle gives in Cat. 1. The chapter, running only fifteen lines in the Greek text, proposes a tripartite distinction among homonymy, synonymy, and paronymy. Overall, the aim is to differentiate the ways in which a common term or a set of related terms can be said to signify something. Put briefly, homonymy refers to things having the same name and different definition; synonymy, to things having both the same name and the same definition; and paronymy, to terms related by their inflected ending. The bare bones of the three-way account may be set down easily. Yet certain interpretive issues concerning the precise lines of the account, as well as the overall scope and nature of Cat. itself, remain subjects of debate.

One long-standing problem arising from the Greek commentators concerns whether Categories is primarily a logical or metaphysical work. The question about the nature of the work as a whole bears on the interpretation of Cat. 1 in the sense that taking one position rather than another would incline us to a more (or less) expansive understanding of homonymy or synonymy.