Abstract
Holistic accounts of meaning normally incorporate a subjective dimension that invites the criticism that they make communication impossible, for speakers are bound to differ in ways the accounts take to be relevant to meaning, and holism generalises any difference over some words to a difference about all, and this seems incompatible with the idea that successful communication requires mutual understanding. I defend holism about meaning from this criticism. I argue that the same combination of properties (subjective origins of value, holism among values, and ultimate publicity of value) is exhibited by monetary value and take the emergence of equilibrium prices as a model for the emergence of public meanings.
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Notes
In contrast, holism as the others use the term at least allows for a kind of vacuous case where there is a language with only one word and its meaning depends on itself.
I am grateful to a reviewer for noting that the qualification ‘materially’ is necessary since new vocabulary would certainly be logically inferentially related to old vocabulary. For example, a conjunction containing old and new vocabulary would entail either conjunct.
People sometimes draw a related distinction between global and local varieties of holism. It seems to be Peacocke’s view (p. 244) that local holisms obtain when there are sets of words whose meanings can only be grasped in conjunction with each other. The holism is local as opposed to global because the relevant totality here is (quite a bit?) less than the largest available. For Peacocke, the vocabularies of places and spatial relationships, or of mass and force, or of meaning and belief, each provide examples of local (perfective) holism. A corresponding local imperfective holism would hold that all of some of a word’s inferential relations to other words are constitutive of its meaning. All conceptual role semantics that admit an analytic-synthetic distinction would qualify as these. This ‘local imperfective holism’ is just the same as what Devitt calls ‘localism’ and I think his terminology is preferable.
‘Valid’ in these contexts means ‘commitment or entitlement preserving,’ not simply logically valid (see Brandom 1994, chapter 2).
And possibly Brandom too. He certainly regards securing the possibility of communication as a key criterion of adequacy for his theory and returns to it again and again. See especially p. 477ff and p. 633ff.
This is explicit in the formal economic proofs of a general market equilibrium, where market prices are vectors in n-dimensional space (where n is the number of goods). The crucial part of that proof employs a price adjustment function incorporating an excess demand function on prices. It is shown that the price adjustment function has a fixed point where the process of adjusting prices to excess demand stops, demand is satisfied, and the market clears. The process is holistic in the collective sense because excess demand is a function of general prices and the prices of all goods are components (dimensions) of these general prices. See Starr 1997, chapter 1 for an overview of the equilibrium proof.
Do not by misled by the fact that the retail price index merely tracks the prices of a small basket of goods. This is a concession to the need to have a tractable measurement of price change. It does not mean prices are changing relative only to the goods in the RPI basket. Prices are changing relative to the goods in the RPI basket, but this is merely an indication of their change in relation to everything.
It should go without saying that the fact that the economic proof cannot be straight-forwardly adopted does not prove that the corresponding point cannot be made in the semantic case. In fact, though they employ game-theoretic techniques rather than the real analysis of general equilibrium theory, recent work by Jäger and van Rooij (2007), van Rooij (2004), Lenaerts et al. (2005), de Vylder and Tuyls (2006) and Lenaerts and de Vylder (2006) show that clear structural parallels can be drawn between economic processes and convergence upon successful communication strategies. Unfortunately, their work does not address the problem of holism so it cannot itself fill the present gap.
I consider barter, even though money as the medium of exchange may seem a more apt analogy, because it is the emergence of public economic value that is relevant here and money complicates this concept but doesn’t alter the fundamentals.
If x A < y B and \(x_{\text{A}}^\prime > y_{\text{B}}^\prime \) at some other point, then if we’re using the real numbers there is an x″ and y″ such that \(x^{{\prime \prime }}_{{\text{A}}} = y^{{\prime \prime }}_{{\text{B}}}\).
And the other good being exchanged is also worth this. This raises a question, why bother exchanging goods that are worth the same? This is a psychological issue distinct from the matter of the economic value of the goods. Perhaps the answer is brute, e.g. you just prefer the colour of one of the goods. But it is also possible that either A or B thinks the other thing is worth more or less in their own terms than what they give for it. This could be an objective matter if it would actually take them longer to produce it themselves than what they offer for it. But at the moment of exchange and for all moments after that the two goods must be of equal value because if one were costlier, it should always be bartered for and never manufactured. The possibility of exchange effects (sic) the equality (since the way the rational person would ‘make’ the good from then on is by earning enough to trade for it).
For instance one dimension of idealisation that would be interesting to see relaxed is the effect on the behaviour of the market of unequal power relationships between agents. If the comparison developed below of economic price and public meaning is plausible, inequalities of power and status between expert authorities and other speakers may account for the Putnamian observation of the division of linguistic labour.
The illustrative sentences are borrowed from Davidson 1984, p. 200. The exact nature of the inter-dependencies depends on the type of holistic theory of meaning at issue. For Davidson the connection obtains because these sentences would be among the beliefs attributed to a speaker by theory of interpretation that satisfied his preferred constraints. For Brandom, the connections are made explicit in entitlement preserving or commitment preserving inferential relationships among the sentences.
Multiplicity of scorekeepers is a feature of Brandom’s account of language (see 1994, chapter 3).
On pragmatic enrichment see Recanati (2004), although he doesn’t discuss this in terms of a conversational score.
This requires holism.
Or, if we’re talking about subsentential expressions, that the semantic value of a subsentential expression is its contribution to the inferential potential of the sentences in which it occurs in a primary capacity (see Brandom (1994) for a detailed working out of this account).
Though otherwise very similar to Davidson’s picture, this account emphasises an additional feature, namely the evolving emergent public meaning of words as the “market” equilibrium semantic values. Individual speakers are subject to a pressure to bring their usage into line with the market, as this maximises their comprehension of others and vice versa. Whereas Davidson’s ‘charity’ involved interpreting others as rational by one’s own lights, the present account also involves adjusting one’s semantic attitudes to accord with others.
I will say briefly how my conception compares with Lewis on convention and Davidson on malapropism. I give, in effect, an argument for why we speak the same language (in some sense). In that respect it is like Lewis’s project in “Languages and Language” but Lewis’s convention-based account assumes that speakers have quite complex beliefs about others (for instance, it must be mutual knowledge that everyone conforms to a certain regularity (1983, p. 165)), whereas this account doesn’t. It differs from Davidson because he thinks communication in particular cases goes by way of ad hoc interpretations of others (‘passing theories’ see Davidson 1986). I do not address this sort of case at all, but only try to provide an a priori rationale for explaining, as he would put it, the degree of initial similarity between the prior theories. Additionally, Davidson tells the story from the interpreter’s eye view as it is an account of the knowledge that would suffice to enable one to interpret the utterances of another (1984, p.125), whereas this is an account of the emergence of a perspective distinct from individual speakers (the perspective of the market person).
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The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and to thank audiences who heard and commented on earlier versions of this paper at University College Dublin and at the UNED Madrid.
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Jorgensen, A.K. Holism, Communication, and the Emergence of Public Meaning: Lessons from an Economic Analogy. Philosophia 37, 133–147 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9143-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9143-7