## 1. General characterization of the view



The label "meaning holism" is generally applied to views
that treat the meanings of all of the words in a language as
interdependent. Meaning holism is typically contrasted with
*atomism* about meaning (where each word's meaning is
independent of every other word's
 meaning),[1]
 and *molecularism* about meaning (where a word's meaning
is tied to the meanings of some comparatively small subset of other
words 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 is
misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual
statement" (Quine 1951: 43), and that "the unit of
empirical significance is the whole of science" (Quine 1951:
42), and one finds an even earlier statement of it in Hempel's
assertion that



> 
> 
> the cognitive meaning of a statement in an empirical language is
> reflected in the totality of its logical relationships to all other
> statements in the language. (Hempel 1950: 59)
> 
> 
> 



The interdependence associated with meaning holism is usually taken to
follow from the meaning of each word (or sentence) being tied to its
use, with this "use" typically being understood in terms
of (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 is
involved in (Block 1986, 1998; Harman 1973; Sellars 1974). The
"belief-focused" and "inference-focused" ways
of characterizing use-based holism are often treated as
 interchangeable,[2]
 and will be so treated here unless the distinction is particularly
relevant in a
 context,[3]
 and so for our purposes here, meaning holism will be understood as
the following general view:



> 
> 
> The determinants of the meanings of our terms are interconnected in a
> way that leads a change in the meaning of any single term to produce a
> change 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 that
they provide a substantive account of what meaning is, and then argue
that 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 to *identify* meaning with some aspects of our
use. Examples of this could be:


* Theories that identify a sentence's meaning with its method
of verification. Verificationism, combined with some plausible
assumptions about the holism of confirmation (Hempel 1950; Quine
1951), would seem to lead to meaning holism.
* Theories that identify a word's meaning with its inferential
role. Which inferences one endorses with a word depends on what one
means by one's other words, and so (when combined with a
rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction--see below) the
web quickly spreads to the entire language. (Block 1986, 1995; Brandom
1994; Field 1977; Harman 1973, 1993; Sellars 1954, 1974)
* Theories that take what a person means by a word to be a
functional property of that person, and assume that functional
properties are individuated holistically. (Block 1998; Churchland
1979, 1986)
* Theories that identify what a person means by a word with all of
the beliefs that they would express using that word. (Bilgrami 1992,
1998)



Identifying meaning with the beliefs associated with a word or its
inferential/functional role leads quickly to a type of meaning holism
because of the way that the connections between such beliefs and
inferences 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 similar
chains, every word will be related inferentially to (and thus
semantically 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 any
other thing we take squirrels not to be). Changing the meaning of one
word thus changes the content of at least some of the inferences and
beliefs that constitute the meaning of other terms in the language,
and so a change in the meaning of one term quickly leads to a change
in the meaning of the rest.



Such fine-grained conceptions of meaning are often motivated by the
thought that only holistically structured meanings that were so tied
to our beliefs or to the inferences that we were disposed to make
could adequately serve the purposes of psychological explanation
(either to deal with Frege-cases (Bilgrami 1992, 1998), to match the
fact that understanding itself is holistic (Brandom 2011: 24; Heal
1994), or to just specify an internalistically determined
"narrow" content (Block
 1995)).[5]
 Most such arguments crucially rely on a sub-argument with something
like the following general form:


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



Semantic atomists usually deny the first premise of this argument, and
semantic molecularists deny the second, and so "indirect"
arguments for meaning holism usually take the form of arguing against
atomism and molecularism. 


### 2.2 Indirect Arguments



As stated above, indirect arguments try to bolster the case for
meaning holism by undermining the case for its most obvious rivals.
Molecularism about meaning may initially be the most appealing
alternative to holism, and indeed, finding a principled way of trying
to stop the "spreading effect" that seems to follow from
taking inferences as relevant to meaning has long been one of the main
objectives for molecularists about meaning (Devitt 1993, 1996; Dummett
1973). Molecularist theories typically try to keep the idea that
meaning is tied to inferential role, but insist that only
*some* of the inferences involved with a term constitute its
meaning. However, drawing a clear line between the
meaning-constitutive and non-meaning-constitutive inferences/beliefs
seems to commit one to a version of the analytic/synthetic distinction
that 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 unstable
resting point between atomism and holism, so that once you give up the
former, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find compelling reasons
not to move all the way to the latter (Fodor and Lepore 1992, but see
Devitt 1996).



While there have been some attempts to make the distinction without
buying into the analytic/synthetic distinction, or to argue that some
version of the analytic/synthetic distinction isn't that bad
after all (Boghossian 1996, 2001, 2003; Devitt 1996; Horwich 2005;
Pacherie 1994; Peacocke 1995, 1997; Russell 2008), such views remain
controversial, and an obvious way to avoid the slippery slope into
meaning holism is to not even make the first step towards molecularism
and just keep one's semantics atomistic (Fodor and Lepore
1992).



Atomistic semantic theories tend to be *causal* theories, and
these tend to fall into two types: backward and forward looking.
Holists (and other critics of atomism) typically argue that both types
of causal account face serious difficulties if they are to remain
atomistic.



Backward looking causal theories inspired by Kripke (1972) and Putnam
(1975) might have initially seemed like candidates for an atomistic
semantics. If what I meant by "cat" were determined by a
causal chain leading back to the kind that prompted the first
"that's a cat" utterance, then one might think that
the determinants of the meaning of each term could be distinct in the
way that atomism requires. However, this initial attempt to restrict
the determinants to a set of initial baptisms quickly ran aground on
various counterexamples (such as the discussion of
"Madagascar" (Evans 1973)), and the realization that some
beliefs about sortals were needed (since the objects we would
encounter at any "baptism" could be counted as instances
of any number of
 kinds),[8]
 resulted in a the view sliding increasingly towards something that
was at least molecularist in
 structure.[9]



Forward looking causal theories (which look ahead to the items that
our concepts cause us to apply terms to rather than back to the ones
that first caused us to form the concept), such as those presented by
writers working in what can roughly be called "Information
Semantics" (Dretske 1981; Fodor 1987, 1990; Stampe 1979), also
attempt to develop semantic theories that are typically atomistic. The
type of use that such atomistic theories must take meaning to be
determined by are typically single applications like "cat"
or at best "That's a cat", since any more complex
examples 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 thus
to the factors that determine their meaning). However, underwriting a
distinction between correct and incorrect use while appealing only to
such simple assertions has proved to be extremely difficult, and there
is no consensus even among the proponents of such atomistic approaches
about what is the most promising way to tackle the problem (see the
discussion 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 has
done a convincing job of preventing classifications that intuitively
seem to be errors from being built into the purported extensions of
our terms. Indeed, it has been argued that the checks on our
dispositions that these atomistic theories need to get
truth-conditions right must include the collateral commitments that
speakers have in particular contexts, and that appealing to these will
lead away from atomism (Boghossian 1989, 1990 (drawing on Kripke
1982); Jackman 2003b; Podlaskowski 2010). 



Furthermore, both the backward and forward looking causal theories run
into trouble when dealing with parts of the language other than the
sorts of kind terms upon which their defenders typically focus. For
instance, both sorts of causal theories seem ill-suited for dealing
with parts of the language like "big", "of",
"quickly", or "unless", none of which invite
the same sort of isolated use that "red" or
"cat"
 might.[10]
 The atomist might seem to require a *different* semantic
theory for these others parts of speech, while the holist and
molecularist can allow that the story about how every word acquires
its value is uniform throughout the language.



The meaning holist thus can argue that both atomism and molecularism
about meaning face serious
 problems.[11]
 However, unlike the direct arguments, which can establish meaning
holism in virtue of giving a substantive account of meaning, indirect
arguments typically just make holism seem more plausible by ruling out
some of the major alternatives. In particular, meaning holism in the
sense focused on here isn't simply entailed by the denial of
atomism and molecularism. The denial of atomism and molecularism leads
to, at best, the following view:



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



One needs to add the assumption that the function from the
determinants of meaning to the meanings themselves is one-to-one (that
is, not only does any change to a word's meaning require some
change in the determinants of its meaning, but also that any change to
the determinants of a word's meaning must produce a change to
its meaning), and doing that will probably require something more like
a "direct" argument, since it is unlikely that one could
argue that the function from use to meaning had to be one-to-one
without some sort of substantial account of how use determined
meaning.


## 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 conflict
with the presumed compositionality of language (Fodor & Lepore
2002). Semantics is supposed to explain, among other things, how the
meanings of sentences and complex terms are a function of the meanings
of their parts, and meaning holism appears to stand in the way of such
an approach. If meaning were, say, inferential role, then the
inferential role of, for instance, "pet fish" would follow
from the inferential roles of "pet" and
"fish", but while one can typically infer "weighs
less than three ounces" from "is a pet fish", this
inference follows neither from "is a pet" or "is a
fish" nor from a combination of those two sets of inferences. In
short, they argue:


1. Meanings are compositional
2. but inferential roles (or any other holistic meaning) are not
compositional.
3. so meanings can't be inferential roles. (Fodor and Lepore
1991)



Holists have a number of responses to this argument. 



One of these is to insist (following Block 1993: 42) that as long as
we can count "weighs less than three ounces if it's a
fish" as part of the inferential role of "it's a
pet" then inferential roles would compose in just the way that
Fodor and Lepore deny. Block argues that any attempt to keep
"weighs less than three ounces if it's a fish" out
of the inferential role of "pet" would already presuppose
the denial of holism, so the compositionality argument isn't an
independent argument against holism since it already presupposes its
denial. 



Another is to follow Brandom in arguing that although, properly
understood, a holistic semantics is "*not
compositional*", it can still be "fully
*recursive"* (Brandom 2008: 135)*.*  That is to
say, while Brandom denies that the meanings of complex expressions can
be determined solely from the meanings of their components, he still
insists that the meanings of expressions at one level of complexity
are determined by the meanings of the expressions at the level below,
and that this recursivity can be used to explain the facts about
systematicity and language learning that compositionality is often
invoked to
 explain.[13]
 Of course, one could still insist that a language whose semantics was
actually compositional might be still *more* systematic, and
*easier* to learn. However, the compositionality argument
against meaning holism needs to show more than just that it would be
*easier for us* if our semantics were compositional, it needs
to show that our semantics *must* be compositional, and this
assumption is what Brandom's argument hopes to undercut.



Both of these responses suggest that while meaning holism may make
giving a compositional/recursive semantics *hard*, it does not
make it impossible. However, this leads to a related argument against
meaning holism that stresses (with Stanley 2008) that the project of
providing a semantics for our language within an atomistic framework
(in which, say, the semantic value of "dog" is tied to the
set of dogs), has been noticeably more productive than any attempt to
do so within a molecular or holistic framework (where, say, the
semantic value of "dog" is a set of inferences or some
other property of the word's
 use).[14]
 While it may be possible that a holistic inferential semantics may
eventually catch up with the results achieved by more traditional
atomistic truth-conditional semantics (see the discussion in and
following Stanley 2006, Other Internet Resources), the results of the
semantic programs thus far may suggest that we should favor meaning
atomism over meaning holism unless given good reasons to do
otherwise.


### 3.2 Instability



Worries about compositionality aside, most of the problems associated
with meaning holism are tied to the way in which it seems to make
meaning *idiosyncratic* and
 *unstable*.[15]
 If what one meant by a term were individuated in terms of, say,
*all* of the beliefs or inferences that one was disposed to
make with it, then two people (or one person at two times) would only
mean the same thing by *any* of their terms if *all* of
their beliefs or inferential dispositions were *identical*. In
effect, meaning holism threatens to erase the distinction between
change/differences of meaning and change/differences of belief, so
that every time I change any one my beliefs, I change the meanings of
all of my terms, and any time two people fail to share a single
belief, the meaning of all their terms and the content of all of their
beliefs must
 differ.[16]


#### 3.2.1 Problems from Instability



Instability presents problems for the meaning holist in the following
areas:



**Change of Mind.** I can't, strictly speaking,
change my mind about any particular proposition, since if I went from
believing, say, "Dogs *are* good pets" to believing
"Dogs *are not* good pets", what I mean by
"Dog" and "Pet" would have changed. As a
result, there is no proposition that I previously thought to be true
that I now treat as false. However, since the most natural way to make
sense of changing one's mind about something is in terms of
changing the truth-value one assigns to a single proposition, the
intuitive notion of change of mind seems lost. (Fodor and Lepore
2002)



**Disagreement.** In much the same way, it's
natural to think of disagreement in terms of two people assigning
different truth values to the same proposition, but if meaning holism
is true, no two people could disagree over a single proposition, since
if they didn't both accept a particular sentence, then they must
differ in what they mean by it, in which case their differing
attitudes don't constitute a disagreement. (Fodor and Lepore
 2002)[17]




**Creative Inference.** Creative inference also seems
problematic for the meaning holist. One could rehearse the inferential
relations between things one already believed, but one couldn't
validly draw new conclusions, since if the conclusion of the inference
is something that one didn't believe already, then the terms in
that conclusion will mean something different than what the seemingly
identical terms meant in the premises, making the inference
 invalid.[18]
 (The inference could, of course, later be recapitulated as a valid
one, since at that point the meaning of the terms in the premises
would have changed as well, but this is just to say that the
recapitulation doesn't capture the transitions that were
actually going on when the inference was first taking place.)



**Language Learning.** Learning a language would be
problematic, since it seems as if one couldn't learn *any
part* of a given language until one had mastered *all* of
it. (Dummett 1973: 597-600, 1976: 44, 1991: 221, see also Bilgrami
1986, Dresner 2002, Jonsson 2014) Of course, one could argue that on
this holistic view, there are no "languages" to learn,
just a series of changing idiolects, and at any point in one's
acquisition period, one would have mastered *some* idiolect.
However, this in turn leads to the following problem.



**Communication.** Strictly speaking, informative
communication would be impossible. No one would mean the same thing by
any of their terms unless they shared all the same beliefs, in which
case, communication would be possible, but uninformative, and truly
understanding the utterances of others would be impossible unless you
already knew everything that they believed. (Fodor 1987; Fodor and
Lepore 1992).



**Psychological Explanation.** No intentional laws or
psychological generalizations would be possible, since no two subjects
would, as a matter of fact, have beliefs with the same content. We
assume that generalizations like "If someone is thirsty, and
they 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 well
supported, but this would require "believing that there is a
glass of water in front of them" is an attitude that lots of
people 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 plain
fact that most people take it to be "obvious" that there
can be changes of belief without changes of meaning, and that when I
come to believe that there are four elephants in the Seattle Zoo, I
haven't changed what I mean by "Elephant". The
incredulous stare is hardly a knockdown argument (especially in
philosophy), but it suggests that meaning holism comes with a
substantial conceptual cost, and so requires equally substantial
benefits to compensate for it.


#### 3.2.2 Coping with Instability



There are a number of ways that the meaning holist can attempt to
answer the objection that the view erases the distinction between
differences/change of meaning and differences/changes of belief. These
include:



**Biting the bullet.** One could simply say that, in
fact, there *isn't* any *real* difference between
change of meaning and change of belief and that we never
*really* communicate, disagree, or change our mind, but
it's hard to imagine someone simply biting that bullet and
leaving it at that. Nevertheless, some have endorsed a modified
version of the above, arguing that, at least *strictly
speaking*, we never communicate, disagree or change our mind, and
then providing an explanation of why things might appear otherwise,
and how *loosely speaking* we do manage to communicate,
disagree, change our minds, etc. Which leads us to...



**Similarity.** Many holists have argued that while none
of us ever mean *precisely* what our compatriots and former
selves do by our terms, we can still explain communication, change of
mind etc. in terms of the fact that the different things that we mean
are still extremely *similar*, so while I don't mean
*precisely* what my wife means by "cat", I still
mean something extremely similar to what she does because we share
*most* of our beliefs and inferences where that term is
concerned. (For versions of something like this approach, see Harman
1973; Block 1986; Churchland 1998; Fultner 1998; Brandom 2007;
Schroeder 2007; Jorgensen 2009; Rovane 2013, Dresner 2019; Pollock
2020). 



However, even if such an appeal to similarity worked for the case
above, there is the problem that for many terms, our total belief sets
simply aren't all that similar. After all, the similarity
response presupposes that most of the beliefs and inferences
associated with a particular word are shared, but even in a generous
sense of sharing, one might think that the total belief set that I
associate with my name for Omaha, a city which I've never
visited, will not be even remotely similar to the belief set of
someone who grew up there.



Furthermore, while the appeal to similarity is very natural, it can be
hard 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 meaning
holism makes problematic. One would like to say that I mean something
similar to my wife by "cat" because, in spite of our
differences, we both believe things like "cats make good
pets", "cats are mammals", "cats are typically
smaller than dogs", etc. However, to say that we
"share" these beliefs would be to assume that we mean the
*same* thing by "pet", "mammal" and
"dog", which is something that the meaning holist is
committed to denying. Strictly speaking, for the meaning holist, I
don't share *any* beliefs and inferences with my
compatriots and past selves, and so similarity can't be
explained in terms of *shared* beliefs and inferences (Fodor
1998; Fodor and Lepore 1992, 1999). 



Of course there may be other ways to pin down similarity, and one of
these can be seen to flow out from the approach found immediately
below.



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



If meaning holism is true only of the "narrow" meaning
used 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 our
different narrow meanings, I can communicate with a compatriot because
our sentences like, say, "Pork chops are generally better in
Memphis than in Portland" will have the same wide truth
conditions in spite of their having different narrow meanings. In much
the same way, disagreement could be explained by the fact that a
single sentence will have the same truth conditions for both me and my
interlocutor (even though we each tie it to different narrow
meanings), and so if I affirm it, and they deny it, then only one of
us can be correct.



The "two factor" theory would also help support something
like the similarity response mentioned above in that narrow meanings
could be treated as similar if they embodied most of the
"same" inferences where those inferences were themselves
typed in terms of having the same wide content. This would allow one
to say that the narrow meanings of "cat" between my wife
and I are very similar, since most of our "cat"-beliefs
have the same
 truth-conditions.[20]



Of course, appeals to narrow content are not uncontroversial. The
notion seems more natural with belief content than linguistic meaning,
and even for the former, there have been doubts raised about whether
it really is a coherent notion of content at all (Bilgrami 1992;
McDowell 1986). Further, even if one accepts that there are these two
sorts of content, we are left with the question of what holds the two
types of meaning together. As Fodor and Lepore put it, why
couldn'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 for
theories that, unlike the more traditional Fregean account where the
mode of presentation is expected to *determine* reference,
follow those who "tend to suppose that a concept's
identification procedure has nothing to do with its reference"
(Margolis & Laurence 1999: 72). Such psychological factors making
up 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 the
sort of instability associated with meaning holism is to appeal to
*context*, rather than similarity, to ensure that
communication, change of mind and the rest are possible. For instance,
Bilgrami (1992) argues that critics of meaning holism fail to
distinguish *aggregate contents* (which are tied to all of the
agent's beliefs) and *local contents* (which are only
tied to those belief relevant in a particular communicative context).
While meaning holism would have all the instability-related problems
mentioned above at an *aggregate* level, at a *local*
level (which is where communication and psychological explanation
actually takes place), content identity can be
 preserved.[22]
 On such an account, only *some* of the beliefs/inferences
associated with a particular word will be active in any particular
context, and so two people who might (indeed, will inevitably) mean
something different at an *aggregate* level (at which we
consider *all* their beliefs) may still mean the same thing in
any particular context, since the beliefs that they take to be
relevant in that context could be identical. In effect, one has
something that looks like a type of molecularist view in each context,
but unlike the standard molecularist, who treats the
meaning-constitutive beliefs/inference as invariant across contexts,
the contextualist allows the relevant subset to change from situation
to situation.



For instance, while the total set of beliefs associated with
"sugar" varies greatly from person to person, if someone
asks me whether I would like some sugar with my coffee, most of our
idiosyncratic sugar-beliefs would be irrelevant, and in that context,
only the beliefs that sugar is sweet, has a certain color, texture and
taste will be active. Since those beliefs are probably shared, I am
able to communicate with that person about sugar in that context even
if we mean something different by the term at the
"aggregate" level.



However, this presupposes a lot about the contexts involved, and the
assumption that even within a particular context, two people would
take the same beliefs/inferences to be relevant is not
uncontroversial. Indeed, if I'm communicating novel information
that my interlocutor doesn't know, this might always entail that
I start off meaning something different than they do (though they may
come to share a meaning by accepting the claim). This worry would be
even more pronounced when we try to move from communication to
disagreement, where, by hypothesis, there is a contextually relevant
sentence involving the words in question that my interlocutor and I
don't both accept. This problem could be avoided by insisting
that the focus of a conversation not be included in the context, and
that the local content simply be stipulated to only include what the
two parties agree on (Bilgrami 1992: 146). However, such a restriction
would seem to make the resulting contents less suitable for
psychological explanation, since the behavior of the speakers involved
in a disagreement would likely be sensitive to their opinions on the
issue 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 beliefs
were restricted to those relevant in a particular context, then even
if they aren't identical, it's quite likely that the
belief sets will be similar even when, as in the case of
"Omaha" above, the two speakers have very different total
beliefs sets associated with the word. Context would thus make appeals
to ubiquitous similarity more plausible, and similarity could be used
as a back up for those contexts which fail to produce context-relative
identity.



**Anti-Individualism.** As stated above, instability
arises not from meaning holism *per se*, but from versions of
meaning holism motivated by an identification of meaning with some
aspect of use, and some of the problems relating to instability can be
mitigated if the meaning holist loosens the connection between meaning
and *individual* use. One natural way to do this is to take it
to be the beliefs and inferences endorsed by a *group* rather
than an *individual* 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 word
even if they endorse different inferences provided that both were
members of a single social group that collectively endorses a single
set of inferences or beliefs. Disagreement, communication, inference,
and change of mind would all thus seem initially less puzzling for the
meaning holist if they happens to be an anti-individualist as
well.



This sort of anti-individualism might seem independently motivated by
the considerations raised in Tyler Burge's "Individualism
and 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 or
society (those of the majority, the experts, etc.) and (2)
individuating the relevant groups themselves.



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



Finally, this sort of answer to instability worries would not be
available to many meaning holists, who, like Block (1986, 1995), seem
driven to meaning holism by an interest in supplying a semantics for
an explicitly *individualistic* psychology. 



**Normativity.** The anti-individualistic response
presented above, like most holistic accounts of meaning, focuses on
the inferences that speakers (or social groups) *do* make,
rather than the ones that they *should* make. However, just as
extensional accounts of meaning tie the meaning of a term to what we
*should* apply it to, not what we simply *do* apply it
to, one might think that the holist could take a similar normative
approach from the inferential side. If one takes this more normative
approach to the inferences involved, many of the instability-based
worries disappear. The inferences I *do* make with the term,
say, "gold" change over time and differ from those that my
compatriots make, but the inferences I *should* make with the
term are considerably more stable and shared. I may change what
inferences I do make about gold's atomic number, but the ones
that I should make with respect to it are stable (Brandom 1994, 2000:
29).



There will, nevertheless, still be some instability even with this
normative account if we merely identify the inferences we should make
with all of the ones that are *truth
 preserving*.[26]
 For instance on such an account, while I *should* infer
"is worth less per ounce than platinum" from "is
gold", if the price of gold were to go up enough, the validity
of that inference would change. However, intuitively the meaning of
"gold" should not be changing in a case like this. A
significant change in gold's price shouldn't cause me to
be unable to understand gold-utterances of people before the price
went up, or view the meaning of "Susan loves gold" as
opaque if I don't know whether it was uttered before or after
the price
 spike.[27]
 That said, if the holist is making an appeal to similarity and
wide-contents as well, then an isolated sentence like that would not
be much of a problem, since the vast majority of the inferences we
should make with the term would still be both constant and shared.



Of course, like the anti-individualist response discussed above, the
normative response won't be available to those meaning holists
who, like Block, motivate their holism in terms of a type of
individualistic functionalist psychology.


### 3.3 "Analyticity" and Objectivity



A final group of objections to meaning holism stem from the assumption
that theories that tie what we mean by a term to some of the beliefs
or inferences associated with it can seem to make the all of the
meaning-constitutive beliefs or inferences "true in virtue of
meaning", and thus in a sense "analytically
 true".[28]
 The meaning molecularist's claim that their proposed
meaning-constitutive inferences need to be valid (say, if the meaning
of "&" were identified with its elimination and
introduction rules, then one would need to treat "\((A \ \&\
B) \rightarrow A\)" as true in virtue of meaning) isn't
entirely uncontroversial, but the assumption that meaning-constitutive
inferences will be valid isn't taken to be problematic even by
the critics of meaning molecularism (who argue instead that particular
candidates for meaning constitutive inferences can't be
accepted, since we can coherently doubt their validity (Burge 1986;
Williamson 2003)). However, while the meaning molecularist can at
least allow that we can make many mistakes, since most of our beliefs
are not meaning constitutive, the meaning holist may seem to be
committed to *all* of our beliefs being true, since all of them
determine 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 all
treated by the meaning holist as simply *true at all*. Whether
the truth involved is analytic or not, it doesn't seem like we
should have to treat *all* of any speaker's beliefs as
true. There are a number of responses to this worry, all of which
appeal to strategies already canvassed in describing the meaning
holist's response to worries about instability.



For instance, one way to cut worries about objectivity short is to
appeal to the narrow/wide content distinction discussed in
 3.2.2,
 and claim that the meanings for which meaning holism holds are not
the sort that relate to *truth.*  Block, in particular, has
insisted that, since the contents for which meaning holism holds
involve *narrow* meanings, the question of their truth
doesn't come up. The "narrow analog" of analyticity
doesn't produce analyticity in the traditional sense, and thus
Block can reject what he calls "The Plausible Sounding
Principle", namely:



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



Since "determinate meaning facts about *narrow* meaning
do not engender analyticities" (Block 1993: 54), the analyticity
worry won't plague this sort of holist. Since narrow contents
have no truth values, "and hence have no truth
conditions", they simply aren't the type of thing that
could be true in virtue of meaning, and thus "aren't even
the *sort* of things that can be analytic" (Block 1993:
61).



Another way for the meaning holist to mitigate worries about
objectivity is to adopt a version of the "contextualist"
approach also mentioned in
 3.2.2.
 On that view, since only some of one's beliefs are relevant to
a term's meaning in any context, one's other beliefs can
turn out to be false when evaluated from that context. However, while
this would allow for some false beliefs, one might worry whether it
goes far enough. Beliefs that speakers in a context didn't agree
on could turn out to be false, but other inferences, inferences that
intuitively seem fallible, turn out to be effectively analytic within
the relevant contexts. For instance if both my interlocutor and I
believe "All sugar comes from sugarcane" in a context
where that belief is relevant (we are, for instance, asked "Name
a product that comes exclusively from a single type of plant")
it would seem as if my answer "sugar" would have to be
correct on the contextualist version of meaning holism, which it
doesn't seem to
 be.[30]




The "anti-individualistic" and "normative"
responses to instability discussed in
 3.2.2
 can also both do service in defending the meaning holist from worries
about objectivity. The anti-individualist strategy would do a good job
accounting for *individual* error, since individual inferences
can be understood as mistaken in virtue of being out of line with the
preferred social usage. Nevertheless, understanding how the preferred
social usage (be it expert usage, majority usage, or something else)
could be mistaken would still be a problem on such an account. The
normative strategy, on the other hand, build's a notion of
objectivity directly into the use appealed to, and so seems best
placed to respect the purported objectivity of our claims (the fact
that the inferences that we *should* make couldn't turn
out to be mistaken on such an account doesn't seem particularly
troubling). However, as discussed in
 3.2.2,
 both of the anti-individualistic and normative responses detach
meaning from individual use in a way that many meaning holists would
find unacceptable.


## 4. Conclusion



Meaning holism thus comes with a number of costs (particularly
relating to instability and objectivity), and while there are a
variety of strategies available to make these costs more bearable, no
single approach to doing so seems problem-free. That said, these
strategies can be complementary, and it may be the case that a
combination of them can do the work in a way that no single one of
them would be able to. In any case, being completely problem free is a
very high bar to set for a philosophical theory, and meaning holists
are free to argue not only that the benefits that come with their view
outweigh the costs, but also that the atomistic and molecularist
theories face equally severe problems of their own.