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Semantic Holism Revisited City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2016 Semantic Holism Revisited Chun-Ping Yen The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1388 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] SEMANTIC HOLISM REVISITED by CHUN-PING YEN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 © 2016 CHUN-PING YEN All Rights Reserved ii SEMANTIC HOLISM REVISITED by Chun-Ping Yen This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Gary Ostertag ______________ ____________________________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Iakovos Vasiliou ______________ ____________________________________________________ Date Executive Officer Graham Priest John Greenwood Stephen Neale David Rosenthal ____________________________________________________ Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK ABSTRACT SEMANTIC HOLISM REVISITED by Chun-Ping Yen Advisor: Professor Graham Priest I defend semantic holism, the view that the meaning of an expression is determined by its relations to every other expression in the language of individual competent users. I argue that, once properly understood, most disadvantages attributed to holism can be dissolved and suggest that the core division between the holist and the non-holist is on the question whether invariant meanings shared across all possible occasions where the corresponded expressions are uttered are necessary for the explanation of meaning sharing. I give reason why the answer is negative and demonstrate how to explain our linguistic interaction without such invariant meanings. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are many people to thank throughout my doctoral studies over the years. Above all, I owe my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Graham Priest, for his thoughtful coaching, inspirational guidance, and constant encouragement, without which this dissertation would not have been possible. Thanks to my committee members, John Greenwood, Stephen Neale, David Rosenthal, and Gary Ostertag for their valuable comments. I am also grateful for the enthusiastic administrative support from Iakovos Vasiliou and John Greenwood over the years. I also want to acknowledge feedbacks from Monique Whitaker, Thomas Kivatinos, Thomas Ferguson, Filippo Casati, Ralph Jenkins, Jacob Archambault, Daniel Boyd, Yuval Abrams, Hitoshi Omori, Che- Ping Su, and other members and visitors of Graham’s group. v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: SEMANTIC HOLISM: WHAT IT IS AND IS NOT ............................................................... 1 1.1 The Doctrine .......................................................................................................................... 2 1.2 Determination ........................................................................................................................ 9 1.3 Compositionality and Sentence Priority .............................................................................. 11 1.4 Examples of Semantic Holism ............................................................................................ 12 1.4.1 Saussure’s internal linguistics ...................................................................................... 13 1.4.2 Brandom’s Inferentialism ............................................................................................. 14 1.5 Making Sense of Semantic Holism ..................................................................................... 18 1.6 Closing Remarks ................................................................................................................. 21 CHAPTER 2: OBJECTIONS AGAINST HOLISM I: COMPOSITIONALITY AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION ....................................................................................................................................................... 23 2.1 The Compositionality Objection ......................................................................................... 23 2.1.1 Compositionality .......................................................................................................... 24 2.1.2 Productivity and systematicity...................................................................................... 30 2.1.3 The argument from understanding ............................................................................... 38 2.2 The Language Acquisition Objection ................................................................................. 41 2.3 Meaning and Understanding ............................................................................................... 44 2.4 Closing Remarks ................................................................................................................. 46 CHAPTER 3: OBJECTIONS AGAINST HOLISM II: STABILITY AND LANGUAGE-WORLD RELATION ... 47 3.1 Holism and the Stability of Linguistic Meaning ................................................................. 47 3.1.1 Two-factor theories ....................................................................................................... 49 3.1.2 Multiple meanings ........................................................................................................ 50 3.1.3 Similarity ...................................................................................................................... 52 vi 3.1.4 The problem of instability ............................................................................................ 53 3.2 Holistic Meanings are Sharable........................................................................................... 54 3.2.1 The role of linguistic meaning in meaning sharing ...................................................... 54 3.2.1.1 Literalism ............................................................................................................... 55 3.2.1.2 Minimalism ............................................................................................................ 56 3.2.1.3 Indexicalism ........................................................................................................... 60 3.2.2 Sharing without shared meaning .................................................................................. 61 3.3 Holism and the Language-world Relation .......................................................................... 63 3.3.1 Argument of general failure of reference ..................................................................... 65 3.3.2 The Fregean assumption ............................................................................................... 67 3.4 Closing Remarks ................................................................................................................. 70 CHAPTER 4: ALTERNATIVES AND THEIR PROBLEMS ...................................................................... 72 4.1 Atomism and the Explanatorily Vacuous ORs ................................................................... 73 4.1.1 Explanatorily vacuous ORs .......................................................................................... 74 4.1.2 The intra-linguistic burden on semantics ...................................................................... 81 4.2 Molecularism and the No-principled-basis Consideration .................................................. 85 4.3 Devitt’s Molecularism ......................................................................................................... 87 4.3.1 The argument from the success of meaning ascriptions ............................................... 88 4.3.2 The argument from our interest in generality ............................................................... 90 4.3.3 The argument from Representationalism ..................................................................... 92 4.4 Borg’s Organizational Lexical Semantics ........................................................................... 94 4.4.1 Assessment ................................................................................................................... 96 4.5 Closing Remarks ............................................................................................................... 100 CHAPTER 5: COMMUNICATION AND THE DIRE CONSEQUENCE OF HOLISM .................................. 102 5.1 Grice and Pragmatics ........................................................................................................ 103 vii 5.1.1 The code model and the inferential model of communication ................................... 104 5.1.2 Grice’s theory of conversation ................................................................................... 109 5.2 Critiques of Grice’s Theory of Conversation .................................................................... 116 5.2.1 The role of the pragmatic principles in recovering what is said ................................. 116 5.2.2 The problem of (CP) and the maxims of conversation ............................................... 118 5.2.3 Literal
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