Quine’s Meaning Holism

In the development and turning of language philosophy and analytic philosophy in the twentieth century, Willard Van Orman Quine is a very unique and important philosopher. He enlightened a large number of philosophers, and will inspire the generations to come. He inherited the essence of empiricism and is profoundly influenced by American?s pragmatism. In Two dogmas of empiricism,he did great damage to the obvious distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. Furthermore, he practiced his doctrine by combining holism with his epistemology and semantic theory. This paper examines the relationships between knowledge, belief and meaning. By means of combing through holism theories and meaning theories, it traces back the generating process and compares the contents of Quine?s meaning holism. The author focuses on analyzing how Quine?s meaning holism was constructed from four different respects——the subject and scope of meaning holism,the causes and influence of removing the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions,the status of observation sentence in Quine?s philosophy and the clarifying function of radical translation. It points out several important arguments and challenges against meaning holism, including the discussion about instability and non-compositionality of meaning holism. In response to them, I summarized some popular methods which try to solve these problems. At the last part, the author retrospect Quine?s reminder and warnings to us on how to understand his meaning holism. There were different contexts for the advancing and application of strong and moderate holism. Strong holism has its theoretical value, but it would be impractical and unworthiness to hold onto strong holism in the circumstance of social communication. This paper hopes to bring out the important revelation of Quine?s meaning holism——experience evidence is far from sufficient for meaning decision or to be the only contributor of meaning. It mainly depends on relations invented by our society and individuals to leap over the gap and fill in the blanks between meager experience evidence, systematic science theories and rich verbal communication. Our understanding of this topic should not be limited on theoretical level. In terms of practically evaluating the developments of theories and cultural communication, we should adopt a more cautious attitude towards propositions which cannot be fully decided by balancing the empirical meaning and subjective presuppositions contained in the incontrovertible propositions. This approach would be of great benefit to the development of our science theory and cultural communication.