Semantic Holism - Moderate Holism

Moderate Holism

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.