Semantic holism

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 philosophical investigations of the later Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein wrote in the Philosophical Investigations, in fact, 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"; and Donald Davidson, in 1967, put it even more sharply by saying that "a sentence (and therefore a word) has meaning only in the context of a (whole) language."

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