È possibile una semantica olistica

Abstract

In this work I discuss the opposition between atomistic and holistic semantics, trying to clarify some confusion concerning the notion of semantic holism. I will be concerned only with a linguistic version of holism, ignoring other variants which are under certain aspects semantic. In the first section I show that some alleged versions of semantic holism are either implausible or not well defined. In the second section I discuss in detail the argument proposed by Fodor and Lepore (1992). According to them, there is no intermediate position between semantic atomism and holism. Fodor, in particular, claims that holism entails very harmful consequences for philosophy of mind and epistemology, so he defends an atomistic (punctuate) conception of meaning. I try to show that this attitude is not justified and, in the last section, I propose an alternative, molecolaristic account of semantics. According to this point of view, what is typically called - not very perspicuously - holism is either a clearly implausible thesis, or an innocuous and reasonable description of semantic phenomena