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Confirmation holism and semantic holism

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Abstract

Fodor and Lepore, in their recent book Holism, maintain that if an inference from semantic anatomism to semantic holism is allowed, certain fairly deleterious consequences follow. In Section 1 Fodor and Lepore's terminology is construed and amended where necessary with the result that the aforementioned deleterious consequences are neither so apparent nor straightforward as they had suggested. In Section 2 their “Argument A” is considered in some detail. In Section 3 their “argument attributed to Quine” is examined at length and a shorter and more perspicacious argument suggested which avoids their charge that the Quinean argument is guilty of an equivocation on the word ‘statement’.

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Harrell, M. Confirmation holism and semantic holism. Synthese 109, 63–101 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00413823

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00413823

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