Meaning Holism
Edited by Indrek Reiland (University of Vienna)
About this topic
Summary | 'Meaning Holism' is a name for a cluster of views about meaning and/or content that emphasize either the priority of some semantic whole over its parts, or take the meanings of words or content and concepts to be interconnected and constitutively dependent on each other. In contrast, atomist views would emphasize the priority of the parts or take the meanings of words or content/concepts to be independent of each other. The first form of holism emphasizes the priority of the sentential over the sub-sentential. We might call this 'Sentential Priority'. It stems from Kant's emphasis of the priority of judgment over concepts and has been inspired by Frege's and Wittgenstein's "context principle" on which one should "never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a sentence" (Frege). It has been subscribed to by Quine, Davidson, Brandom, but also some Neo-Griceans like Neale and Schiffer who take speaker meaning to be basic and define speaker reference in terms of it. In contrast, atomists take the sub-sentential (reference, predication) to be basic and define the sentential in terms of it. The second form of holism is what's more commonly known as 'Holism' on which the meaning of a word is somehow constitutively connected to the meanings of all other words (same goes for content and concepts). Holism is related to the rejection of analytic/synthetic distinction by Quine and his confirmation holism and Davidson's interpretivist view of meaning and content. It is thought to follow from the conceptual role or inferential views of meaning and content of Sellars, Harman, Block, Brandom etc. This tradition has been influentially criticized by Fodor&Lepore. Some central questions are whether holism is compatible with learnability of language and compositionality, and whether it has problems with accounting for the intuitive stability of meaning and content. There have been attempts to reconcile atomism and holism. As far as Sentential Priority, one might make progress by distinguishing between content-words or open-category expressions for which atomism seems plausible, and functional or closed-category expressions the meanings of which can only be understood in terms of their contribution to the sentential. In both cases some have argued that atomism is correct in semantics, but holism correct at the level of metasemantics. |
Key works | Davidson's commitment to sentential primacy is stated in Davidson 1977 and criticized in Perry 1994. Schiffer's commitment is articulated in Schiffer 1981. Davidson's interpretivist view is set out in Davidson 1973. For Sellars's inferentialist view see Sellars 1954. Harman's and Block's views are stated in Harman 1973 and Block 1986. Brandom's normative inferentialism is spelled out in Brandom 1994. Fodor&Lepore's critical work on holism can be found in Fodor & Lepore 1992. On whether compositionality is compatible with holism see Pagin 1997. On closed- and open-category expressions see Szabo 2019. On attempts to reconcile one or the other types of atomism and holism by appeal to the semantics/metasemantics distinction see Linnebo 2009, Pagin 1997, Jackman 2005. |
Introductions | For an introduction to compositionality and the context principle see Szabó 2008. For an accessible and insightful discussion of Frege's context principle see Cariani 2018. For introductions to holism see Block 1996, Pagin 2006, Dresner 2012, and Jackman 2014. For an introduction to conceptual role semantics see Greenberg & Harman 2006. |
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