Abstract

In the past few decades, semantic holism, primarily in the guise of conceptual role semantics, has been an influential doctrine in both the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. In a recent challenge to such doctrines, Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore have inspired a spirited debate over the viability of any theory of meaning or cognition that entails semantic holism. Two general problems emerge from the debate: a problem concerning the stability of content , and a problem concerning the internal consistency of typical holistic doctrines. The former problem raises serious worries about the ability of such accounts to accommodate the phenomena of communication, disagreement, change of opinion, translation, and intentional explanation, while the latter problem questions the compatibility of three doctrines typically held by holists: that meaning is compositional, that meaning is conceptual role, and that Quine successfully showed that there can be no useful analytic/synthetic distinction. ;In this dissertation, I aim to show that these problems are not native to semantic holism, but, rather, are the result of an assumption almost ubiquitous in these discussions: semantic individualism. To this end, I consider and reject a number of attempts to handle these worries on behalf of the individualistic holist. A holistic account of content which is free from this assumption is the only way to way avoid the problems of instability and inconsistency while remaining a holist. In the end, I suggest that one result of giving up this assumption would be the renewed possibility of a viable conceptual role semantics, and perhaps even a useful analytic/synthetic distinction. In any case, the result would be a move in the direction of a neo-Fregean conception of content