The Ontological Status of Meaning Holism

doi:10.3969/j.issn.1674-8921.2014.06.013

Abstract

Abstract: Meaning holism is a highly controversial topic discussed heatedly in the philosophy of language over the past 20 years. One view is that meaning holism is wrong because it leads to three bad consequences: meaning holism would make (1) language learning, (2) communication and understanding impossible, and (3) contradict the principle of compositionality. This paper holds that the arguments against meaning holism are not tenable, as they belong to epistemological questions, and have nothing to do with the ontology of holism. This paper argues that meaning holism is right as it satisfies the necessary and sufficient conditions of holism as follows: linguistic expressions have a family of qualitative properties and a generic ontological dependence on each other; furthermore, they are arranged in a suitable way and unified in the language system.

CLC Number:

H319

WANG Aihua. The Ontological Status of Meaning Holism[J]. Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies, 2014, 14(06): 91-97.

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