The term “meaning holism” is generally applied to viewsthat treat the meanings of all of the words in a language asinterdependent. Holism draws much of its appeal from the way in whichthe usage of all our words seems interconnected, and runs into manyproblems because the resultant view can seem to conflict with (amongother things) the intuition that the meanings of individual words areby and large shared and stable.

This entry will examine the strengths of the arguments for and againstmeaning holism.

• 1. General characterization of the view
• 2. Arguments for Meaning Holism
  • 2.1 Direct Arguments
  • 2.2 Indirect Arguments
• 3. Problems for Meaning Holism
  • 3.1 Compositionality
  • 3.2 Instability
    • 3.2.1 Problems from Instability
    • 3.2.2 Coping with Instability
  • 3.3 “Analyticity” and Objectivity
• 4. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. General characterization of the view

The label “meaning holism” is generally applied to viewsthat treat the meanings of all of the words in a language asinterdependent. Meaning holism is typically contrasted withatomism about meaning (where each word’s meaning isindependent of every other word’s meaning),^[1] andmolecularism about meaning (where a word’s meaningis tied to the meanings of some comparatively small subset of otherwords in the language—such as “kill” being tied to“cause” and “die” or “if …then…” being tied to “not” and“or”).

The view is often traced to Quine’s claims that “It ismisleading to speak of the empirical content of an individualstatement” (Quine 1951: 43), and that “the unit ofempirical significance is the whole of science” (Quine 1951:42), and one finds an even earlier statement of it in Hempel’sassertion that

the cognitive meaning of a statement in an empirical language isreflected in the totality of its logical relationships to all otherstatements in the language. (Hempel 1950: 59)

The interdependence associated with meaning holism is usually taken tofollow from the meaning of each word (or sentence) being tied to itsuse, with this “use” typically being understood in termsof (1) all of the beliefs that could be expressed with (the words in)it (Bilgrami 1992; Davidson 1984), or (2) all of the inferences it isinvolved in (Block 1986, 1998; Harman 1973; Sellars 1974). The“belief-focused” and “inference-focused” waysof characterizing use-based holism are often treated as interchangeable,^[2] and will be so treated here unless the distinction is particularlyrelevant in a context,^[3] and so for our purposes here, meaning holism will be understood asthe following general view:

The determinants of the meanings of our terms are interconnected in away that leads a change in the meaning of any single term to produce achange in the meanings of each of the rest.

2. Arguments for Meaning Holism

2.1 Direct Arguments

Some arguments for meaning holism are “direct” in thatthey provide a substantive account of what meaning is, and then arguethat if that is what meaning is, then meaning holism must follow.

For instance, meaning holism seems to result from radical use-theories^[4] that attempt toidentify meaning with some aspects of ouruse. Examples of this could be:

• Theories that identify a sentence’s meaning with its methodof verification. Verificationism, combined with some plausibleassumptions about the holism of confirmation (Hempel 1950; Quine1951), would seem to lead to meaning holism.
• Theories that identify a word’s meaning with its inferentialrole. Which inferences one endorses with a word depends on what onemeans by one’s other words, and so (when combined with arejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction—see below) theweb quickly spreads to the entire language. (Block 1986, 1995; Brandom1994; Field 1977; Harman 1973, 1993; Sellars 1954, 1974)
• Theories that take what a person means by a word to be afunctional property of that person, and assume that functionalproperties are individuated holistically. (Block 1998; Churchland1979, 1986)
• Theories that identify what a person means by a word with all ofthe beliefs that they would express using that word. (Bilgrami 1992,1998)

Identifying meaning with the beliefs associated with a word or itsinferential/functional role leads quickly to a type of meaning holismbecause of the way that the connections between such beliefs andinferences spread through a language. For instance, a word like“squirrel” might be inferentially connected to, say,“animal” which is in turn connected to “Koala”which is connected to “Australia”, and through similarchains, every word will be related inferentially to (and thussemantically entangled with) every other term in the language(especially when one considers connections like that between, say,“is a squirrel” and “is not a building” or anyother thing we take squirrels not to be). Changing the meaning of oneword thus changes the content of at least some of the inferences andbeliefs that constitute the meaning of other terms in the language,and so a change in the meaning of one term quickly leads to a changein the meaning of the rest.

Such fine-grained conceptions of meaning are often motivated by thethought that only holistically structured meanings that were so tiedto our beliefs or to the inferences that we were disposed to makecould adequately serve the purposes of psychological explanation(either to deal with Frege-cases (Bilgrami 1992, 1998), to match thefact that understanding itself is holistic (Brandom 2011: 24; Heal1994), or to just specify an internalistically determined“narrow” content (Block 1995)).^[5] Most such arguments crucially rely on a sub-argument with somethinglike the following general form:

1. Some of an expression’s inferential properties must be partof its meaning.
2. If some of an expression’s inferential properties are partof its meaning, then they all are.
3. So, all of the inferential properties of an expression are part ofits meaning.^[6]

Semantic atomists usually deny the first premise of this argument, andsemantic molecularists deny the second, and so “indirect”arguments for meaning holism usually take the form of arguing againstatomism and molecularism.

2.2 Indirect Arguments

As stated above, indirect arguments try to bolster the case formeaning holism by undermining the case for its most obvious rivals.Molecularism about meaning may initially be the most appealingalternative to holism, and indeed, finding a principled way of tryingto stop the “spreading effect” that seems to follow fromtaking inferences as relevant to meaning has long been one of the mainobjectives for molecularists about meaning (Devitt 1993, 1996; Dummett1973). Molecularist theories typically try to keep the idea thatmeaning is tied to inferential role, but insist that onlysome of the inferences involved with a term constitute itsmeaning. However, drawing a clear line between themeaning-constitutive and non-meaning-constitutive inferences/beliefsseems to commit one to a version of the analytic/synthetic distinctionthat has been out of favor since Quine’s attack on it (Quine 1951),^[7] and it is a familiar criticism of molecularism that it is an unstableresting point between atomism and holism, so that once you give up theformer, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find compelling reasonsnot to move all the way to the latter (Fodor and Lepore 1992, but seeDevitt 1996).

While there have been some attempts to make the distinction withoutbuying into the analytic/synthetic distinction, or to argue that someversion of the analytic/synthetic distinction isn’t that badafter all (Boghossian 1996, 2001, 2003; Devitt 1996; Horwich 2005;Pacherie 1994; Peacocke 1995, 1997; Russell 2008), such views remaincontroversial, and an obvious way to avoid the slippery slope intomeaning holism is to not even make the first step towards molecularismand just keep one’s semantics atomistic (Fodor and Lepore1992).

Atomistic semantic theories tend to becausal theories, andthese tend to fall into two types: backward and forward looking.Holists (and other critics of atomism) typically argue that both typesof causal account face serious difficulties if they are to remainatomistic.

Backward looking causal theories inspired by Kripke (1972) and Putnam(1975) might have initially seemed like candidates for an atomisticsemantics. If what I meant by “cat” were determined by acausal chain leading back to the kind that prompted the first“that’s a cat” utterance, then one might think thatthe determinants of the meaning of each term could be distinct in theway that atomism requires. However, this initial attempt to restrictthe determinants to a set of initial baptisms quickly ran aground onvarious counterexamples (such as the discussion of“Madagascar” (Evans 1973)), and the realization that somebeliefs about sortals were needed (since the objects we wouldencounter at any “baptism” could be counted as instancesof any number of kinds),^[8] resulted in a the view sliding increasingly towards something thatwas at least molecularist in structure.^[9]

Forward looking causal theories (which look ahead to the items thatour concepts cause us to apply terms to rather than back to the onesthat first caused us to form the concept), such as those presented bywriters working in what can roughly be called “InformationSemantics” (Dretske 1981; Fodor 1987, 1990; Stampe 1979), alsoattempt to develop semantic theories that are typically atomistic. Thetype of use that such atomistic theories must take meaning to bedetermined by are typically single applications like “cat”or at best “That’s a cat”, since any more complexexamples of use (such as sentences like “cats are mammals”or “cats like milk”) run the risk of tying the meaning of“cat” to our use of other words in the language (and thusto the factors that determine their meaning). However, underwriting adistinction between correct and incorrect use while appealing only tosuch simple assertions has proved to be extremely difficult, and thereis no consensus even among the proponents of such atomistic approachesabout what is the most promising way to tackle the problem (see thediscussion of “the disjunction problem” in Adams &Aizawa 2010). It has been tried in terms of optimal conditions(Papineau 1987), contexts where the term was learned (Dretske 1981)asymmetric causal dependence (Fodor 1990), but no such account hasdone a convincing job of preventing classifications that intuitivelyseem to be errors from being built into the purported extensions ofour terms. Indeed, it has been argued that the checks on ourdispositions that these atomistic theories need to gettruth-conditions right must include the collateral commitments thatspeakers have in particular contexts, and that appealing to these willlead away from atomism (Boghossian 1989, 1990 (drawing on Kripke1982); Jackman 2003b; Podlaskowski 2010).

Furthermore, both the backward and forward looking causal theories runinto trouble when dealing with parts of the language other than thesorts of kind terms upon which their defenders typically focus. Forinstance, both sorts of causal theories seem ill-suited for dealingwith parts of the language like “big”, “of”,“quickly”, or “unless”, none of which invitethe same sort of isolated use that “red” or“cat” might.^[10] The atomist might seem to require adifferent semantictheory for these others parts of speech, while the holist andmolecularist can allow that the story about how every word acquiresits value is uniform throughout the language.

The meaning holist thus can argue that both atomism and molecularismabout meaning face serious problems.^[11] However, unlike the direct arguments, which can establish meaningholism in virtue of giving a substantive account of meaning, indirectarguments typically just make holism seem more plausible by ruling outsome of the major alternatives. In particular, meaning holism in thesense focused on here isn’t simply entailed by the denial ofatomism and molecularism. The denial of atomism and molecularism leadsto, at best, the following view:

The determinants of the meanings of our terms are interconnected in away that leads a change in thedeterminants the meaning ofany single term to produce a change in thedeterminants of themeanings of each of the rest.^[12]

To get from this view to full-fledged meaning holism, namely,

The determinants of the meanings of our terms are interconnected in away that leads a change in themeaning of any single term toproduce a change in themeanings of each of the rest.

One needs to add the assumption that the function from thedeterminants of meaning to the meanings themselves is one-to-one (thatis, not only does any change to a word’s meaning require somechange in the determinants of its meaning, but also that any change tothe determinants of a word’s meaning must produce a change toits meaning), and doing that will probably require something more likea “direct” argument, since it is unlikely that one couldargue that the function from use to meaning had to be one-to-onewithout some sort of substantial account of how use determinedmeaning.

3. Problems for Meaning Holism

The most common objections to meaning holism relate to three topics:compositionality, instability and objectivity.

3.1 Compositionality

An initial problem with meaning holism is that it seems to conflictwith the presumed compositionality of language (Fodor & Lepore2002). Semantics is supposed to explain, among other things, how themeanings of sentences and complex terms are a function of the meaningsof their parts, and meaning holism appears to stand in the way of suchan approach. If meaning were, say, inferential role, then theinferential role of, for instance, “pet fish” would followfrom the inferential roles of “pet” and“fish”, but while one can typically infer “weighsless than three ounces” from “is a pet fish”, thisinference follows neither from “is a pet” or “is afish” nor from a combination of those two sets of inferences. Inshort, they argue:

1. Meanings are compositional
2. but inferential roles (or any other holistic meaning) are notcompositional.
3. so meanings can’t be inferential roles. (Fodor and Lepore1991)

Holists have a number of responses to this argument.

One of these is to insist (following Block 1993: 42) that as long aswe can count “weighs less than three ounces if it’s afish” as part of the inferential role of “it’s apet” then inferential roles would compose in just the way thatFodor and Lepore deny. Block argues that any attempt to keep“weighs less than three ounces if it’s a fish” outof the inferential role of “pet” would already presupposethe denial of holism, so the compositionality argument isn’t anindependent argument against holism since it already presupposes itsdenial.

Another is to follow Brandom in arguing that although, properlyunderstood, a holistic semantics is “notcompositional”, it can still be “fullyrecursive” (Brandom 2008: 135). That is tosay, while Brandom denies that the meanings of complex expressions canbe determined solely from the meanings of their components, he stillinsists that the meanings of expressions at one level of complexityare determined by the meanings of the expressions at the level below,and that this recursivity can be used to explain the facts aboutsystematicity and language learning that compositionality is ofteninvoked to explain.^[13] Of course, one could still insist that a language whose semantics wasactually compositional might be stillmore systematic, andeasier to learn. However, the compositionality argumentagainst meaning holism needs to show more than just that it would beeasier for us if our semantics were compositional, it needsto show that our semanticsmust be compositional, and thisassumption is what Brandom’s argument hopes to undercut.

Both of these responses suggest that while meaning holism may makegiving a compositional/recursive semanticshard, it does notmake it impossible. However, this leads to a related argument againstmeaning holism that stresses (with Stanley 2008) that the project ofproviding a semantics for our language within an atomistic framework(in which, say, the semantic value of “dog” is tied to theset of dogs), has been noticeably more productive than any attempt todo so within a molecular or holistic framework (where, say, thesemantic value of “dog” is a set of inferences or someother property of the word’s use).^[14] While it may be possible that a holistic inferential semantics mayeventually catch up with the results achieved by more traditionalatomistic truth-conditional semantics (see the discussion in andfollowing Stanley 2006, Other Internet Resources), the results of thesemantic programs thus far may suggest that we should favor meaningatomism over meaning holism unless given good reasons to dootherwise.

3.2 Instability

Worries about compositionality aside, most of the problems associatedwith meaning holism are tied to the way in which it seems to makemeaningidiosyncratic andunstable.^[15] If what one meant by a term were individuated in terms of, say,all of the beliefs or inferences that one was disposed tomake with it, then two people (or one person at two times) would onlymean the same thing byany of their terms ifall oftheir beliefs or inferential dispositions wereidentical. Ineffect, meaning holism threatens to erase the distinction betweenchange/differences of meaning and change/differences of belief, sothat every time I change any one my beliefs, I change the meanings ofall of my terms, and any time two people fail to share a singlebelief, the meaning of all their terms and the content of all of theirbeliefs must differ.^[16]

3.2.1 Problems from Instability

Instability presents problems for the meaning holist in the followingareas:

Change of Mind. I can’t, strictly speaking,change my mind about any particular proposition, since if I went frombelieving, say, “Dogsare good pets” to believing“Dogsare not good pets”, what I mean by“Dog” and “Pet” would have changed. As aresult, there is no proposition that I previously thought to be truethat I now treat as false. However, since the most natural way to makesense of changing one’s mind about something is in terms ofchanging the truth-value one assigns to a single proposition, theintuitive notion of change of mind seems lost. (Fodor and Lepore2002)

Disagreement. In much the same way, it’snatural to think of disagreement in terms of two people assigningdifferent truth values to the same proposition, but if meaning holismis true, no two people could disagree over a single proposition, sinceif they didn’t both accept a particular sentence, then they mustdiffer in what they mean by it, in which case their differingattitudes don’t constitute a disagreement. (Fodor and Lepore 2002)^[17]

Creative Inference. Creative inference also seemsproblematic for the meaning holist. One could rehearse the inferentialrelations between things one already believed, but one couldn’tvalidly draw new conclusions, since if the conclusion of the inferenceis something that one didn’t believe already, then the terms inthat conclusion will mean something different than what the seeminglyidentical terms meant in the premises, making the inference invalid.^[18] (The inference could, of course, later be recapitulated as a validone, since at that point the meaning of the terms in the premiseswould have changed as well, but this is just to say that therecapitulation doesn’t capture the transitions that wereactually going on when the inference was first taking place.)

Language Learning. Learning a language would beproblematic, since it seems as if one couldn’t learnanypart of a given language until one had masteredall ofit. (Dummett 1973: 597–600, 1976: 44, 1991: 221, see also Bilgrami1986, Dresner 2002, Jönsson 2014) Of course, one could argue that onthis holistic view, there are no “languages” to learn,just a series of changing idiolects, and at any point in one’sacquisition period, one would have masteredsome idiolect.However, this in turn leads to the following problem.

Communication. Strictly speaking, informativecommunication would be impossible. No one would mean the same thing byany of their terms unless they shared all the same beliefs, in whichcase, communication would be possible, but uninformative, and trulyunderstanding the utterances of others would be impossible unless youalready knew everything that they believed. (Fodor 1987; Fodor andLepore 1992).

Psychological Explanation. No intentional laws orpsychological generalizations would be possible, since no two subjectswould, as a matter of fact, have beliefs with the same content. Weassume that generalizations like “If someone is thirsty, andthey believe that there is a glass of water in front of them, then(all else being equal), they will try to drink from it” are wellsupported, but this would require “believing that there is aglass of water in front of them” is an attitude that lots ofpeople have, and for the meaning holist, there are, strictly speaking,no such shared attitudes. (Fodor, 1987; Fodor and Lepore 1992)^[19]

The Incredulous Stare. Finally, there is the plainfact that most people take it to be “obvious” that therecan be changes of belief without changes of meaning, and that when Icome to believe that there are four elephants in the Seattle Zoo, Ihaven’t changed what I mean by “Elephant”. Theincredulous stare is hardly a knockdown argument (especially inphilosophy), but it suggests that meaning holism comes with asubstantial conceptual cost, and so requires equally substantialbenefits to compensate for it.

3.2.2 Coping with Instability

There are a number of ways that the meaning holist can attempt toanswer the objection that the view erases the distinction betweendifferences/change of meaning and differences/changes of belief. Theseinclude:

Biting the bullet. One could simply say that, infact, thereisn’t anyreal difference betweenchange of meaning and change of belief and that we neverreally communicate, disagree, or change our mind, butit’s hard to imagine someone simply biting that bullet andleaving it at that. Nevertheless, some have endorsed a modifiedversion of the above, arguing that, at leaststrictlyspeaking, we never communicate, disagree or change our mind, andthen providing an explanation of why things might appear otherwise,and howloosely speaking we do manage to communicate,disagree, change our minds, etc. Which leads us to…

Similarity. Many holists have argued that while noneof us ever meanprecisely what our compatriots and formerselves do by our terms, we can still explain communication, change ofmind etc. in terms of the fact that the different things that we meanare still extremelysimilar, so while I don’t meanprecisely what my wife means by “cat”, I stillmean something extremely similar to what she does because we sharemost of our beliefs and inferences where that term isconcerned. (For versions of something like this approach, see Harman1973; Block 1986; Churchland 1998; Fultner 1998; Brandom 2007;Schroeder 2007; Jorgensen 2009; Rovane 2013, Dresner 2019; Pollock2020).

However, even if such an appeal to similarity worked for the caseabove, there is the problem that for many terms, our total belief setssimply aren’t all that similar. After all, the similarityresponse presupposes that most of the beliefs and inferencesassociated with a particular word are shared, but even in a generoussense of sharing, one might think that the total belief set that Iassociate with my name for Omaha, a city which I’ve nevervisited, will not be even remotely similar to the belief set ofsomeone who grew up there.

Furthermore, while the appeal to similarity is very natural, it can behard to spell out in detail since the intuitive sense in which, say,my wife and I “share most of our beliefs and inferences”seems to presuppose just the sort of content identity that meaningholism makes problematic. One would like to say that I mean somethingsimilar to my wife by “cat” because, in spite of ourdifferences, we both believe things like “cats make goodpets”, “cats are mammals”, “cats are typicallysmaller than dogs”, etc. However, to say that we“share” these beliefs would be to assume that we mean thesame thing by “pet”, “mammal” and“dog”, which is something that the meaning holist iscommitted to denying. Strictly speaking, for the meaning holist, Idon’t shareany beliefs and inferences with mycompatriots and past selves, and so similarity can’t beexplained in terms ofshared beliefs and inferences (Fodor1998; Fodor and Lepore 1992, 1999).

Of course there may be other ways to pin down similarity, and one ofthese can be seen to flow out from the approach found immediatelybelow.

Narrow Content and Wide Content. Another way ofmaking biting the bullet more palatable is by arguing that what wemean by any word involves two parts, a “wide” meaning thatis understood in terms of something atomistic like reference, and a“narrow” meaning that is closer to something holistic likeinferential role (Block 1986, 1993, 1995; Field 1977).

If meaning holism is true only of the “narrow” meaningused for psychological explanation (Block 1993), then communication,disagreement, change of mind etc. can be explained in terms of the“wide” truth-conditional meaning. In spite of ourdifferent narrow meanings, I can communicate with a compatriot becauseour sentences like, say, “Pork chops are generally better inMemphis than in Portland” will have the same wide truthconditions in spite of their having different narrow meanings. In muchthe same way, disagreement could be explained by the fact that asingle sentence will have the same truth conditions for both me and myinterlocutor (even though we each tie it to different narrowmeanings), and so if I affirm it, and they deny it, then only one ofus can be correct.

The “two factor” theory would also help support somethinglike the similarity response mentioned above in that narrow meaningscould be treated as similar if they embodied most of the“same” inferences where those inferences were themselvestyped in terms of having the same wide content. This would allow oneto say that the narrow meanings of “cat” between my wifeand I are very similar, since most of our “cat”-beliefshave the same truth-conditions.^[20]

Of course, appeals to narrow content are not uncontroversial. Thenotion seems more natural with belief content than linguistic meaning,and even for the former, there have been doubts raised about whetherit really is a coherent notion of content at all (Bilgrami 1992;McDowell 1986). Further, even if one accepts that there are these twosorts of content, we are left with the question of what holds the twotypes of meaning together. As Fodor and Lepore put it, whycouldn’t something have the same “narrow” meaning as“water” and at the same time refer to the number four?(Fodor and Lepore 1992: 170). This worry is most pronounced fortheories that, unlike the more traditional Fregean account where themode of presentation is expected todetermine reference,follow those who “tend to suppose that a concept’sidentification procedure has nothing to do with its reference”(Margolis & Laurence 1999: 72). Such psychological factors makingup the narrow content would thus be “merely associated”with a wide content rather than helping determine it.^[21]

Contextualism. Yet another way of dealing with thesort of instability associated with meaning holism is to appeal tocontext, rather than similarity, to ensure thatcommunication, change of mind and the rest are possible. For instance,Bilgrami (1992) argues that critics of meaning holism fail todistinguishaggregate contents (which are tied to all of theagent’s beliefs) andlocal contents (which are onlytied to those belief relevant in a particular communicative context).While meaning holism would have all the instability-related problemsmentioned above at anaggregate level, at alocallevel (which is where communication and psychological explanationactually takes place), content identity can be preserved.^[22] On such an account, onlysome of the beliefs/inferencesassociated with a particular word will be active in any particularcontext, and so two people who might (indeed, will inevitably) meansomething different at anaggregate level (at which weconsiderall their beliefs) may still mean the same thing inany particular context, since the beliefs that they take to berelevant in that context could be identical. In effect, one hassomething that looks like a type of molecularist view in each context,but unlike the standard molecularist, who treats themeaning-constitutive beliefs/inference as invariant across contexts,the contextualist allows the relevant subset to change from situationto situation.

For instance, while the total set of beliefs associated with“sugar” varies greatly from person to person, if someoneasks me whether I would like some sugar with my coffee, most of ouridiosyncratic sugar-beliefs would be irrelevant, and in that context,only the beliefs that sugar is sweet, has a certain color, texture andtaste will be active. Since those beliefs are probably shared, I amable to communicate with that person about sugar in that context evenif we mean something different by the term at the“aggregate” level.

However, this presupposes a lot about the contexts involved, and theassumption that even within a particular context, two people wouldtake the same beliefs/inferences to be relevant is notuncontroversial. Indeed, if I’m communicating novel informationthat my interlocutor doesn’t know, this might always entail thatI start off meaning something different than they do (though they maycome to share a meaning by accepting the claim). This worry would beeven more pronounced when we try to move from communication todisagreement, where, by hypothesis, there is a contextually relevantsentence involving the words in question that my interlocutor and Idon’t both accept. This problem could be avoided by insistingthat the focus of a conversation not be included in the context, andthat the local content simply be stipulated to only include what thetwo parties agree on (Bilgrami 1992: 146). However, such a restrictionwould seem to make the resulting contents less suitable forpsychological explanation, since the behavior of the speakers involvedin a disagreement would likely be sensitive to their opinions on theissue about which they disagree.^[23]

Still, the appeal to context might be viewed as a supplement to,rather than alternative to, the similarity response. If the beliefswere restricted to those relevant in a particular context, then evenif they aren’t identical, it’s quite likely that thebelief sets will be similar even when, as in the case of“Omaha” above, the two speakers have very different totalbeliefs sets associated with the word. Context would thus make appealsto ubiquitous similarity more plausible, and similarity could be usedas a back up for those contexts which fail to produce context-relativeidentity.

Anti-Individualism. As stated above, instabilityarises not from meaning holismper se, but from versions ofmeaning holism motivated by an identification of meaning with someaspect of use, and some of the problems relating to instability can bemitigated if the meaning holist loosens the connection between meaningandindividual use. One natural way to do this is to take itto be the beliefs and inferences endorsed by agroup ratherthan anindividual that determine a word’s meaning(Brandom 1994, 2000). On such an account, two different individuals(or one individual at two times) could mean the same thing by a wordeven if they endorse different inferences provided that both weremembers of a single social group that collectively endorses a singleset of inferences or beliefs. Disagreement, communication, inference,and change of mind would all thus seem initially less puzzling for themeaning holist if they happens to be an anti-individualist aswell.

This sort of anti-individualism might seem independently motivated bythe considerations raised in Tyler Burge’s “Individualismand the Mental”,^[24] and it shares with Burge’s account the challenges of (1)determining just what beliefs or inferences are endorsed by a group orsociety (those of the majority, the experts, etc.) and (2)individuating the relevant groups themselves.

Furthermore, given that what is believed about anything even at asocial level undoubtedly changes over time, and given the spreadingeffect endemic to meaning holism that leads a change in one element toultimately produce changes in the rest, one might expect that most ofour terms will end up changing their meaning each day even for theanti-individualist meaning holist. For instance, if we allow that,say, the experts determine what inferences or beliefs are tied to themeaning of any particular term, then any changes to theirterm-specific belief set will not only change the meaning of thatterm, but also cascade down through the language to ultimately affectevery word just as it did in the individual case. Since some change inexpert belief aboutsomething happens every day, one mightthink that we are still left in a state of comparative flux.Consequently, while the appeal to the social-determination of meaningallows forsynchronic communication, disagreement, etc., thediachronic sense of all of these are still undermined(unless, of course, this appeal to anti-individualism is combined withsome of the appeals to similarity, wide contents, or context discussed above).^[25]

Finally, this sort of answer to instability worries would not beavailable to many meaning holists, who, like Block (1986, 1995), seemdriven to meaning holism by an interest in supplying a semantics foran explicitlyindividualistic psychology.

Normativity. The anti-individualistic responsepresented above, like most holistic accounts of meaning, focuses onthe inferences that speakers (or social groups)do make,rather than the ones that theyshould make. However, just asextensional accounts of meaning tie the meaning of a term to what weshould apply it to, not what we simplydo apply itto, one might think that the holist could take a similar normativeapproach from the inferential side. If one takes this more normativeapproach to the inferences involved, many of the instability-basedworries disappear. The inferences Ido make with the term,say, “gold” change over time and differ from those that mycompatriots make, but the inferences Ishould make with theterm are considerably more stable and shared. I may change whatinferences I do make about gold’s atomic number, but the onesthat I should make with respect to it are stable (Brandom 1994, 2000:29).

There will, nevertheless, still be some instability even with thisnormative account if we merely identify the inferences we should makewith all of the ones that aretruth preserving.^[26] For instance on such an account, while Ishould infer“is worth less per ounce than platinum” from “isgold”, if the price of gold were to go up enough, the validityof that inference would change. However, intuitively the meaning of“gold” should not be changing in a case like this. Asignificant change in gold’s price shouldn’t cause me tobe unable to understand gold-utterances of people before the pricewent up, or view the meaning of “Susan loves gold” asopaque if I don’t know whether it was uttered before or afterthe price spike.^[27] That said, if the holist is making an appeal to similarity andwide-contents as well, then an isolated sentence like that would notbe much of a problem, since the vast majority of the inferences weshould make with the term would still be both constant and shared.

Of course, like the anti-individualist response discussed above, thenormative response won’t be available to those meaning holistswho, like Block, motivate their holism in terms of a type ofindividualistic functionalist psychology.

3.3 “Analyticity” and Objectivity

A final group of objections to meaning holism stem from the assumptionthat theories that tie what we mean by a term to some of the beliefsor inferences associated with it can seem to make the all of themeaning-constitutive beliefs or inferences “true in virtue ofmeaning”, and thus in a sense “analytically true”.^[28] The meaning molecularist’s claim that their proposedmeaning-constitutive inferences need to be valid (say, if the meaningof “&” were identified with its elimination andintroduction rules, then one would need to treat “\((A \ \&\B) \rightarrow A\)” as true in virtue of meaning) isn’tentirely uncontroversial, but the assumption that meaning-constitutiveinferences will be valid isn’t taken to be problematic even bythe critics of meaning molecularism (who argue instead that particularcandidates for meaning constitutive inferences can’t beaccepted, since we can coherently doubt their validity (Burge 1986;Williamson 2003)). However, while the meaning molecularist can atleast allow that we can make many mistakes, since most of our beliefsare not meaning constitutive, the meaning holist may seem to becommitted toall of our beliefs being true, since all of themdetermine what we mean.^[29] The issue isn’t so much that all such beliefs are true“in virtue of meaning”, but rather that they are alltreated by the meaning holist as simplytrue at all. Whetherthe truth involved is analytic or not, it doesn’t seem like weshould have to treatall of any speaker’s beliefs astrue. There are a number of responses to this worry, all of whichappeal to strategies already canvassed in describing the meaningholist’s response to worries about instability.

For instance, one way to cut worries about objectivity short is toappeal to the narrow/wide content distinction discussed in3.2.2, and claim that the meanings for which meaning holism holds are notthe sort that relate totruth. Block, in particular, hasinsisted that, since the contents for which meaning holism holdsinvolvenarrow meanings, the question of their truthdoesn’t come up. The “narrow analog” of analyticitydoesn’t produce analyticity in the traditional sense, and thusBlock can reject what he calls “The Plausible SoundingPrinciple”, namely:

Inferences that are part of inferential roles must be regarded by theinferential role theorist as analytic. For these inferences are whatare taken to constitute meaning, and inferences that constitutemeaning are analytic. (Block 1993: 51)

Since “determinate meaning facts aboutnarrow meaningdo not engender analyticities” (Block 1993: 54), the analyticityworry won’t plague this sort of holist. Since narrow contentshave no truth values, “and hence have no truthconditions”, they simply aren’t the type of thing thatcould be true in virtue of meaning, and thus “aren’t eventhesort of things that can be analytic” (Block 1993:61).

Another way for the meaning holist to mitigate worries aboutobjectivity is to adopt a version of the “contextualist”approach also mentioned in3.2.2. On that view, since only some of one’s beliefs are relevant toa term’s meaning in any context, one’s other beliefs canturn out to be false when evaluated from that context. However, whilethis would allow for some false beliefs, one might worry whether itgoes far enough. Beliefs that speakers in a context didn’t agreeon could turn out to be false, but other inferences, inferences thatintuitively seem fallible, turn out to be effectively analytic withinthe relevant contexts. For instance if both my interlocutor and Ibelieve “All sugar comes from sugarcane” in a contextwhere that belief is relevant (we are, for instance, asked “Namea product that comes exclusively from a single type of plant”)it would seem as if my answer “sugar” would have to becorrect on the contextualist version of meaning holism, which itdoesn’t seem to be.^[30]

The “anti-individualistic” and “normative”responses to instability discussed in3.2.2 can also both do service in defending the meaning holist from worriesabout objectivity. The anti-individualist strategy would do a good jobaccounting forindividual error, since individual inferencescan be understood as mistaken in virtue of being out of line with thepreferred social usage. Nevertheless, understanding how the preferredsocial usage (be it expert usage, majority usage, or something else)could be mistaken would still be a problem on such an account. Thenormative strategy, on the other hand, build’s a notion ofobjectivity directly into the use appealed to, and so seems bestplaced to respect the purported objectivity of our claims (the factthat the inferences that weshould make couldn’t turnout to be mistaken on such an account doesn’t seem particularlytroubling). However, as discussed in3.2.2, both of the anti-individualistic and normative responses detachmeaning from individual use in a way that many meaning holists wouldfind unacceptable.

4. Conclusion

Meaning holism thus comes with a number of costs (particularlyrelating to instability and objectivity), and while there are avariety of strategies available to make these costs more bearable, nosingle approach to doing so seems problem-free. That said, thesestrategies can be complementary, and it may be the case that acombination of them can do the work in a way that no single one ofthem would be able to. In any case, being completely problem free is avery high bar to set for a philosophical theory, and meaning holistsare free to argue not only that the benefits that come with their viewoutweigh the costs, but also that the atomistic and molecularisttheories face equally severe problems of their own.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Jacob Beck, David Chalmers, Paul Horwich, Muhammad AliKhalidi, Ernie Lepore, Robert Myers, Peter Pagin, Judy Pelham,Gurpreet Rattan, Claudine Verheggen, and a number of anonymousreferees for comments on earlier drafts.