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From: liny@clu.cf.ac.uk (Yuen Lin)
Subject: Quine's holism
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Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 11:07:03 GMT
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Wittgenstein once said that to undertand a sentence is to undertand
the language. In the same vein, Quine contented that the meaning
of a sentence is determined by the whole system of sentences, or
to put it another way, by the whole theory. There is also Conceptual
Role Theory in philosophy and psychology, which is essentially in the
same tradition. This theory says that the meaning of a sentence is
determined by sentences which are inferable from it. Other scholars
whose theories are also holistic in essence include Davidson and
Marovscik.

The above theories are the ones I adopt (with modifications). But I have
two difficulties at the moment. One is concerned with Quine's holism
specifically. The description of holism is scattered in numerous articles
by Quine, and there doen't seem to be a article by him which gives a clear and
complete description. I have also read many articles by otheres commenting
on Quine's holism, but they are usually either too technical and hard to
read, or only focusing on some bits of the holism. So I would appreciate
it if somebody could point to me references which describes Quine's
holism in a clear, plain, and complete way.

My second difficulty is with holism in general, and with its computational
implication in specific.  It is a common criticism, and a fair one in
my view, which is something like this:

	Holism seems to suggest that to understand a certain sentence
we must first understansd sentences which are inferrable from it (or the
whole system of sentence, or the whole language). But to undestand
any of the inferable sentences we must in turn first understand all the
sentences which can be derived from this one. So one imagine that
the process would go on and on, and we would never be able to understand
a single sentence, at least it would take us very long time to complete
the computation. This doesn`t seem to correspond to reality, for we understand
a sentence very quickly. Another related problem is: when will such computation
terminate?


Eliminating the first difficult will be useful to me in particular. But
many who are interested in language will benefit if the second can be
resolved. Thus I urge the interested readers to give some thought on these
questions. Posting your comments on the net or emailing them to me are
both welcome.


Yuen Lin










