Abstract
Semantic holists view what one's terms mean as function of all of one's beliefs and applications. Holists will thus be coherentists about how one's usage is justified: showing that one's usage of a term is justified involves showing how it coheres with the rest of one's beliefs and applications. Semantic reductionists, on the other hand, will understand such justification in a classically foundationalist fashion. Now Saul Kripke has, on Wittgenstein's behalf, famously argued for a type of scepticism about meaning and the possibility of demonstrating the correctness of one's usage. However, Kripke's argument has bite only if one understands justification in classically foundationalist terms. Consequently, Kripke's arguments, if good, lead not to a type of scepticism about meaning, but rather to the conclusion that one should be a coherentist about the justification of our usage, and thus a holist about semantic facts.
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