Definitional knowledge is knowledge of the essential properties of words, an encyclopedic knowledge is knowledge of contingent properties of words. On this view, the words of a language have an objective institutional status. Since words are objectively existing entities, they have essential and contingent properties. For this reason, objectivist hold that words have correct definitions-definitions that are objectively correct as a matter of institutional fact. The correspondence between words, on the one hand, and entities and categories in the world, on the other, induces a correspondence between the essential properties of words and the essential properties of those entities and categories: - Our definitional knowledge of words corresponds to the essential properties of the entities and categories that the words designate.
- Lakoff (1987), Pag. 172