Abstract
At its most extreme, semantic, or meaning, holism is the doctrine that all of the inferential properties of an expression constitute its meaning. This doctrine is opposed by semantic localism which, at its most extreme, denies that any of the inferential relations of an expression constitute its meaning. Despite its primafacie implausibility, semantic holism is ubiquitous. It has, as Jerry Fodor says, something of the status of the received doctrine in the philosophy of language (Fodor 1987: 57). And it is urged, or taken for granted, in psychology and AI. In this paper I shall look critically at the case for semantic holism. The case can always be made to fit the following basic argument:
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