Radical Empiricism II

Abstract

We have so far discussed, in relation to semantic holism, what Quine regards as the minor reductionist alternatives: the extensional theory of meaning, and the theory that meanings are either mental or mind-independent semantic universals. In this chapter, we shall turn to the major avenues by which Quine arrived at holism: semantic verificationism and behaviourism. Quine argues that both verificationism and behaviourism fail, and that the way they fail leaves open only behavioural holism as an account of meaning. Very generally, verificationism fails because it rests on the assumption that meanings are attributed to (not terms but) sentences one-by-one, in isolation from whatever larger linguistic and theoretical contexts the sentences occur in; behaviourism fails because, like other variations of semantic reductionism, it rests on what Quine takes to be the realistic myth of in pluribus unum, the view that, for every meaningful term, the entities the term applies or refers to must have some property in common. Let us now examine these arguments in detail.