Abstract
What is holism? Ironically, one has to confront almost the whole corpus of Michael Dummett’s writings1 to extract an answer; and considerations that prompt professions of holism are almost inextricable from those that support the thesis of inextricability. Dummett more than anyone has been both explicit about what he understands by holism, and forceful in his reasons for rejecting it. Still, there are vacillations in that understanding, usually tailored to the reasons for rejection. Can his formulations and criticisms of holism be improved upon? Can his doctrine of molecu-larity be refined? And can one find a middle position which recognises, with the holist, certain brute facts about complexity, but which descries, with the molecularist, enough manageable structure to get a satisfactory semantical theory going? I shall devote three sections to answering these questions affirmatively.
This paper was delivered to the Conference in honour of Donald Davidson at Rutgers, New Jersey in April/May 1984. I am grateful to Alan Millar, Christopher Peacocke, Alan Weir and Crispin Wright for their comments on an earlier draft; and to Louise Antony for prompting me to be clearer about what I meant by separability.
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Notes
Cf. K. Lorenz, Behind the Mirror (London, 1977).
Cf. J. Fodor, The Language of Thought (Crowell, New York, 1975) p.85: “… single items in the vocabulary of a natural language may encode concepts of extreme sophistication and complexity.”
In his Critical Notice of G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds.) Truth and Meaning (OUP, 1976) in Synthese 52 (1982), Martin Bell says at p.141: Whether or not a truth theory for a language implies that its sentences obey bivalence, (McDowell) says, depends upon the proof theory of the metalanguage, and he comments that an intuitionist proof theory could be employed in a truth theory which was still “fundamentally Tarskian”. (Both McDowell and Evans say this in their papers without, unfortunately, referring to a published example.) In my paper ‘From Logic to Philosophies’ (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 33 (1982) 287–301) I observed at p.297 that indeed minimal logic sufficed for the derivation of T-sentences. I have taken this opportunity to give the details that justify this claim and supply what Bell is missing.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Tennant, N. (1987). Holism, Molecularity and Truth. In: Taylor, B.M. (eds) Michael Dummett. Nijhoff International Philosophy Series, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3541-9_2
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