Minimal Meaning Holism

1. Fears, worries and hopes Holism is a multifarious doctrine, which pertains to language, thought, action, confirmation or hypothesis testing, and the nature of reality. Meaning holism is also a multifarious doctrine, which pertains to expressions, sentences, kinds of sentences, languages, meanings, and possibly all the rest of the various things just mentioned. Meaning holism is intricate, "interlocked", inextricable, and... holistic, a sort of glue or virus which invades everything it touches, or so it seems. There is here some sort of paradox. In their attempts to eradicate meaning holism, and holism tout court , from various areas in the philosophy of language and in the philosophy of mind the philosophers who wanted to oppose the doctrine have tended to treat it as a single, more or less unified doctrine answering certain basic assumptions, and they have attempted to destroy it by distinguishing various forms or versions of holism, various grades of holisticity. But once you distinguish various forms or degrees of holism, some of which being less dangerous, holism looses its prima facie unity, and hence its threatening character. So why was it so threatening in the first place, and why should the particular versions be frightening in themselves? The answer, for those who are afraid of meaning holism, must be: because the adoption of a seemingly innocuous version of holism leads you, by some form of gentle slippery slope, to the general, horrible, intricate wholism (holism all stars), the general syndrome of which the supposedly innocuous version is but a symptom. Exemples of this strategy are provided by Dummett and by Fodor. Dummett first assimilates meaning holism to the doctrine which he calls "radical" " orconstitutive holism", that the meaning of a single sentence in a language cannot be understood unless one understands all the sentences in a language (he gives an analogy with a game of strategy where the significance of a single move cannot be understood without undersanding all the rules and possible moves of the game). He then realizes that this constitutive form of