Семантический холизм: от Фреге к Квайну и молекулярности значений.

Semantic holism is a theory in the philosophy of language to the effect that a certain part of language, be it a term or a complete sentence, can only be understood through its relations to a (previously understood) larger segment of language. There is substantial controversy, however, as to exactly what the larger segment of language in question consists of. In recent years, the debate surrounding semantic holism, which is one among the many forms of holism that are debated and discussed in contemporary philosophy, has tended to centre on the view that the "whole" in question consists of an entire language.

Since the use of a linguistic expression is only possible if the speaker who uses it understands its meaning, one of the central problems for analytic philosophers has always been the question of meaning. What is it? Where does it come from? How is it communicated? And, among these questions, what is the smallest unit of meaning, the smallest fragment of language with which it is possible to communicate something? At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, Gottlob Frege and his followers abandoned the view, common at the time, that a word gets its meaning in isolation, independently from all the rest of the words in a language. Frege, as an alternative, formulated his famous context principle, according to which it is only within the context of an entire sentence that a word acquires its meaning. In the 1950s, the agreement that seemed to have been reached regarding the primacy of sentences in semantic questions began to unravel with the collapse of the movement of logical positivism and the powerful influence exercised by the later Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein wrote in the Philosophical Investigations that "comprehending a proposition means comprehending a language". About the same time or shortly after, W. V. O. Quine wrote that "the unit of measure of empirical meaning is all of science in its globality";</blockquote>

For Quine then (although Fodor and Lepore have maintained the contrary), and for many of his followers, confirmation holism and semantic holism are inextricably linked. Since confirmation holism is widely accepted among philosophers, a serious question for them has been to determine whether and how the two holisms can be distinguished or how the undesirable consequences of unbuttoned holism, as Michael Dummett has called it, can be limited.

Numerous philosophers of language have taken the latter avenue, abandoning the early Quinean holism in favour of what Michael Dummett has labelled semantic molecularism. These philosophers generally deny that the meaning of an expression E depends on the meanings of the words of the entire language L of which it is part and sustain, instead, that the meaning of E depends on some subset of L. These positions, notwithstanding the fact that many of their proponents continue to call themselves holists, are actually intermediate between holism and atomism. Dummett, for example, after rejecting Quinean holism (holism tout court in his sense), takes precisely this approach. But those who would opt for some version of moderate holism need to make the distinction between the parts of a language that are "constitutive" of the meaning
of an expression E and those that are not without falling into the extraordinarily problematic analytic/synthetic distinction. Fodor and Lepore (1992) present several arguments to demonstrate that this is impossible.

Since the concept of semantic holism, as explained above, is often used to refer to not just theories of meaning in natural languages but also to theories of mental content such as the hypothesis of a language of thought, the question often arises as to how to reconcile the idea of semantic holism (in the sense of the meanings of expressions in mental languages) with the phenomenon called externalism in philosophy of mind. Externalism is the thesis that the propositional attitudes of an individual are determined, at least in part, by her relations with her environment (both social and natural). Hilary Putnam formulated the thesis of the natural externalism of mental states in his The Meaning of "Meaning". In it, he described his famous thought experiment involving Twin Earths: two individuals, Calvin and Carvin, live, respectively, on the real earth (E) of our everyday experience and on an exact copy (E') with the only difference being that on E "water" stands for the substance while on E' it stands for some substance macroscopically identical to water but which is actually composed of XYZ. According to Putnam, only Calvin has genuine experiences that involve water, so only his term "water" really refers to water. Tyler Burge, in Individualism and the Mental, describes a different thought experiment that led to the notion of the social externalism of mental contents. In Burge's experiment, a person named Jeffray believes that he has arthritis in his thighs and we can correctly attribute to him the (mistaken) belief that he has arthritis in his thighs because he is ignorant of the fact that arthritis is a disease of the articulation of the joints. In another society, there is an individual named Goodfrey who also believes that he has arthritis in the thighs. But in the case of Goodfrey the belief is correct because in the counterfactual society in which he lives "arthritis" is defined as a disease that can include the thighs. The question then arises of the possibility of reconciling externalism with holism. The one seems to be saying that meanings are determined by the external relations (with society or the world), while the other suggests that meaning is determined by the relation of words (or beliefs) to all the other words (or beliefs). Frederik Stjernfelt identifies at least three possible ways to reconcile them and then points out some objections. The first approach is to insist that there is no conflict because holists do not mean the phrase "determine beliefs" in the sense of individuation but rather of attribution. But the problem with this is that if one is not a "realist" about mental states, then all we are left with is the attributions themselves and, if these are holistic, then we really have a form of hidden constitutive holism rather than a genuine attributive holism. But if one is a "realist" about mental states, then why not say that we can actually individuate them and therefore that instrumentalist attributions are just a short term strategy? Another approach is to say that externalism is valid only for certain beliefs and that holism only suggests that beliefs are determined only in part by their relations with other beliefs. In this way, it is possible to say that externalism applies only to those beliefs not determined by their relations with other beliefs (or for the part of a belief that is not determined by its relations with other parts of other beliefs), and holism is valid to the extent that beliefs (or parts of beliefs) are not determined externally. The problem here is that the whole scheme is based on the idea that certain relations are constitutive (i. e. necessary) for the determination of the beliefs and others are not. Thus, we have reintroduced the idea of an analytic/synthetic distinction with all of the problems that that carries with it. A third possibility is to insist that there are two distinct types of belief: those determined holistically and those determined externally. Perhaps the external beliefs are those that are determined by their relations with the external world through observation and the holistic ones are the theoretical statements. But this implies the abandonment of a central pillar of holism: the idea that there can be no one to one correspondence between behavior and beliefs. There will be cases in which the beliefs that are determined externally correspond one to one with perceptual states of the subject. One last proposal is to carefully distinguish between so called narrow content states and broad content states. The first would be determined in a holistic manner and the second non holistically and externalistically. But how to distinguish between the two notions of content while providing a justification of the possibility of formulating an idea of narrow content that does not depend on a prior notion of broad content? These are some of the problems and questions that have still to be resolved by those who would adopt a position of "holistic externalism" or "externalist holism".