Semantic Holism - Semantic Holism and Confirmational Holism

Semantic Holism and Confirmational Holism

The key to answering this question lies in going back to Quine and his attack on logical positivism. The logical positivists, who dominated the philosophical scene for almost the entire first half of the twentieth century, maintained that genuine knowledge consisted in all and only such knowledge as was capable of manifesting a strict relationship with empirical experience. Therefore, they believed, the only linguistic expressions (manifestations of knowledge)that had meaning were those that either directly referred to observable entities, or that could be reduced to a vocabulary that directly referred to such entities. A sentence S contained knowledge only if it possessed a meaning, and it possessed a meaning only if it was possible to refer to a set of experiences that could, at least potentially, verify it and to another set that could potentially falsify it. Underlying all this, there is an implicit and powerful connection between epistemological and semantic questions. This connection carries over into the work of Quine in Two Dogmas of Empiricism.

Quine's holistic argument against the neo-positivists set out to demolish the assumption that every sentence of a language is bound univocally to its own set of potential verifiers and falsifiers and the result was that the epistemological value of every sentence must depend on the entire language. Since the epistemological value of every sentence, for Quine just as for the positivists, was the meaning of that sentence, then the meaning of every sentence must depend on every other. As Quine states it:

All of our so-called knowledge or convictions, from questions of geography and history to the most profound laws of atomic physics or even mathematics and logic, are an edifice made by man that touches experience only at the margins. Or, to change images, science in its globality is like a force field whose limit points are experiences…a particular experience is never tied to any proposition inside the field except indirectly, for the needs of equilibrium which affect the field in its globality.

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.