Holism and externalism both seem to be of interest as applications of the idea that influence percolates over networks of relations rather than being confined to discrete entities; in other words, they seem to imply that there are no necessary boundaries. First, let me briefly introduce the idea of holism. Holism, or meaning holism to be precise, is characterised by two of its bitterest opponents, Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore, as “the doctrine that only whole languages or whole theories or whole belief systems really have meanings, so that the meaning of smaller units – words, sentences, hypotheses, predictions, discourses, dialogues, texts, thoughts, and the like – are merely derivative.”202 Holism is contrasted with atomism, the doctrine that semantic properties
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are particular to a single entity. Fodor and Lepore distinguish the focus of their collected volume from other kinds of holisms, such as that about confirmation, interpretation, or individuation of functional properties, although one of their criticisms is that arguments for “holism” often do not make this distinction. Further, they worry about the difficulty of quarantining meaning holism from broader questions about epistemology, intentional explanation and metaphysics. I do not share their worry. My aim is not to offer comprehensive surveys of holism and externalism but to propose reasons for preferring a combined holist-externalist metaphysic over any form of Internalism, which will amount to a preference for an explicitly in-discrete approach over an implicitly discrete approach.
According to Fodor and Lepore, one worry holists must face is that the relation of any part of a system (language, theory etc) to the whole is in question, as a nonsensical question – it follows, on their view of holism, that no part should exist in any meaningful sense without the accompanying whole. So learning a language becomes impossible without learning it in its entirety, understanding a theory becomes impossible without the understanding arriving in a “single spasm of seamless cognition” in Fodor and Lepore’s words203, and of course providing a simple explanation becomes a lifetime’s labour. Or so it seems. A more subtle worry of Fodor and Lepore’s is somewhat paradoxical – if the content of thought is holistic (multiply connected), and sensitive to the thinker’s context, it may turn out that two people thinking the “same” thought may have completely different mental contents. This would make generalising about such content impossible, and hence render a scientific psychology of intentionality impossible. If “the same” is problematic for two people, then it is even possible that mental content from one person-timeslice204 to the next may differ radically, and if this seems absurd then, on their view, holism is absurd. Fodor and Lepore’s line of attack is that they are seeking an argument from the premise that semantic properties are anatomic (shared with at least one other entity) to the conclusion that they are holistic, but their claim is that such an argument does not exist. I don’t wish to confront their worries separately, but to show that on my account of holism such worries are defused.
original).
203 Fodor & Lepore (1992), p.9. 204
This concept requires a commitment to a four-dimensional, or “block” universe view of time. See my brief discussion of time later in this chapter.
Now I will briefly introduce externalism. Externalism first became identified as externalism of mental content, in the work of Hilary Putnam in particular. His thesis was quite undogmatic, in claiming that at least some mental content refers to entities external to the thinker’s mind. Putting this another way, the claim is that causal relations in the world can play a role in determining meaning. The reason Putnam’s thesis seems so restrained can be partly explained by the strong claim of the internalist position he was critiquing – the claim of internalism is that all mental content refers to entities internal to the thinker’s mind, in the form of representations which result from transformed, augmented or interpreted input. His triumphant conclusion, “Cut the pie any way you like, ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head!”205, nicely captures the flavour of this dispute. In this form, externalism is a moderation of an opposing strong position, and this clearly allows for degrees of externality. It is a view that can be accommodated to atomism, as the various forms of empiricism attest; and it is a view which is held to some degree by Jerry Fodor. It can be characterised quite reasonably, if a little misleadingly, as the doctrine that mental content depends on the agent’s context, and it therefore doesn’t suffer the fate of holism by being given an extreme characterization which caricatures its departure from the strong position of atomism.
The antiholist’s worry is that in a holist world there are no principled grounds at all for making distinctions, and since they discern the basis for distinctions at every turn, holism must be false. They believe that the most relevant distinction in this case is between one thing and every thing, and there are very good grounds for having faith in the primacy of particular things, as the work of Strawson with which this dissertation commenced attests – after all, we are confronted with objects to which we assign singular names all the time. The intuition that thought and the world are deeply connected in this way goes back to the dawn of philosophical thinking, to the form of The One at the culmination of Parmenides’ Way of Truth, as I indicated in Chapter One: The One is still, complete, and tightly bounded. Parmenides-inspired thought is impressed by discreteness; the separateness which results from the real being bounded and complete. Discreteness manifests as a respect for categories and absolute distinctions, and a disrespect for continua and relative difference; in a desire to break
205
Putnam (1975), “The meaning of ‘meaning’.” Reprinted in Mind, language and reality, philosophical papers, volume 2, (pp. 215-271) (London: CUP), Emphasis in the original.
things down to their atomic constituents in order to understand them; in a preference for sameness expressed as identity rather than resemblance; and in a belief in essential differences which make things what they are. Truth as correspondence, and the logical atomism which reinvigorated empiricism, may be regarded as extreme manifestations. Connection, on this view, is a matter of finding a common feature which can be passed from one entity to another, because the entities themselves are inviolable. There is a faith in concepts being defined by necessary and sufficient conditions, and in symbols as carriers of both meaning and structure, and, most recently, a growing faith in information as a bedrock metaphysical concept.
There are some obvious reasons for detecting common ground between holism and externalism. First, in their canonical form they both refer to meaning and the content of thought. Second, each appears to be a reaction to a strongly-opposed position which is susceptible to a shared description; the position that the content of thought is highly discrete – in the case of atomism, discrete to an atomic entity; and in the case of internalism, discrete to an individual mind. As Akeel Bilgrami puts it, Fodor apparently believes that meaning and the content of thought are more directly related than they are, which encourages his retreat to atomism in order to prevent what he sees as the only alternative; a slide into rampant holism206. Third, each shares a recent lineage involving WVO Quine and Donald Davidson, and owes more than a passing debt to a third enigmatic figure, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Interestingly, none of these writers made strong claims to either of the terms “holism” or “externalism”207. I will start by drawing a holist metaphysic from the work of Wittgenstein, then move on to briefly sketch Quine’s holism, which largely leaves such a metaphysic unsaid. In the following section I will use Donald Davidson’s holism to illustrate links with externalism and indeterminacy.
Wittgenstein and Quine
Wittgenstein was terribly interested in the way everything was connected, and in his early work was struck by the crystalline clarity with which the interdependence of things can be thought as a whole, as my use of the early sections of the Tractatus to convey the
206 Bilgrami (1995), “Review of A Theory of Content and Other Essays; and Holism: A Shoppers’ Guide.”
Journal of Philosophy, 92 (6), 330-44.
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discrete but composite nature of facts reveals. Thanks to his early interest in Schopenhauer’s concept of will he struggled against the lure of solipsism, which is an extreme form of internalism. In solipsism the internality of experience is taken to its logical conclusion – that nothing exists except myself, and in particular my mental states. Wittgenstein’s refutation of this position centred on his arguments against the possibility of a private language.
Wittgenstein starts in the TractatusLogico-Philosophicus (1922) by pointing out that the world is not primarily made up of things, but of arrangements of things into facts, and this leads immediately to thinking of logical thought and the world as being connected by their structure - he says (TLP, 2.013) “Every thing is, as it were, in a space of possible atomic facts. I can think of this space as empty, but not of the thing without the space.” The very idea of independence is rethought; he says (2.0122) “The thing is independent, in so far as it can occur in all possible circumstances, but this form of independence is a form of connexion with the atomic fact, a form of dependence.” Every thought needs embedding in a matrix of activities and other thoughts in order to be made sense of - (3.13) “To the proposition belongs everything which belongs to the projection; but not what is projected ... In the projection, therefore, its sense is not yet contained, but the possibility of expressing it.” What makes this sense meaningful is the fact that a totality exists into which it fits: (3.42) “Although a proposition may only determine one place in logical space, the whole logical space must already be given by it...” He goes on to point out the formative role this overall structure has on its components, and the extent to which each element owes its role to the sum of all others: “...The logical scaffolding around the picture determines the logical space. The proposition reaches through the whole logical space.”208
In the Tractatus Wittgenstein gives us a number of pointers to a subtle way of thinking about “things” not as elements of reality in their own right, but as elements by virtue of the place they play in the arrangement of all other “things”. The closer you get to the things, the more they become mere placeholders for a particular conjunction of influences and powers. One significant cost of this way of thinking is that the “whole” has a certain closure; it is conceived as a completed unity, and it is the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of this kind of act which Fodor and Lepore exploit in their critique of
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holism. In addition it is a static, changeless unity. One unlikely benefit is a new understanding of subjectivity in this relational, boundaryless reality, a denuded subjectivity close to Kant’s transcendental ego. Interdependence undermines a strong role for a personal centre of consciousness, a metaphysical subject or “I”, which will be a larger theme in Wittgenstein’s later work, while at the same time it reserves a place for that form of consciousness as a node in the web of relations with its own unique perspective on that web. This, he says, near the end of the Tractatus, is what is correct about solipsism (5.64) “Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.”
The later Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations focuses more philosophical attention on the nature of connection itself, and away from the structure within which connection does its work. The effect, however, is to open the structure, introduce the possibility of change, and diminish the extent to which the “whole” need be conceived as a unity. Consider an object like a football team, which I introduced earlier. There is a kind of continuity in the team, despite it being composed of different players from season to season, and I earlier called this an overlapping-strands continuity. Wittgenstein offers a variation on overlapping-strands continuity when he considers the nature of conceptual connection, and here he offers the image of a rope, as I also noted in the previous chapter. This is a view of the kind of unity which results from multiple overlapping strands having no common start or end, hence no determinate bound can sever all strands to result in a self-contained object. It is also, in its boundary-dissolving, an element in Wittgenstein’s attack on the idea of a mental “inside” being essentially different from an “outside”, which I will return to. Boundary dissolving of a different sort was Quine’s entry to holism, to which I now turn,
The boundary Quine attacked was a fundamental distinction made famous by Kant – that there are some elements of mental content which owe their true status necessarily to other wholly mental elements rather than the world. These analytic elements are therefore true a priori and statements based on them can stand alone; eg, “the angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees”. Synthetic elements, by contrast, depend upon experience, and statements based upon them require support from other statements. The result of the dissolution of the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements is that no statements gain indubitable power by virtue of being analytic, just as no
statements are indubitable by virtue of their direct sensory content – this is confirmation holism; or as Quine says “Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.”
Quine goes further (according to Fodor and Lepore’s reconstruction of his argument) when he urges that the significant unit of confirmation is no longer the single term, not even the statement, but the whole of science. And the final plank of the argument is to claim that the method of confirmation of a statement just is its meaning. This view results, in the hands of later defenders of holism, in a picture of a theory as a sort of network, in which statements are the nodes and their semantic relations are the paths connecting the nodes. The meaning of a statement is its position in the network, and to take this image seriously, Fodor and Lepore comment, is to apparently believe that any change in a theory necessitates changing the value of all the statements. To accept this interpretation would seem to commit one to a certain narrow view of the nature of such a network that could result in its resistance to change: first, that the posited relations between nodes are rigid, and therefore immune to deformation; and second, that the nodes themselves are tightly-bounded, such that rigid relations can firmly connect to them and maintain the integrity of the overall structure. This is a vision of holism seen through the prism of discreteness. It is not a diagnosis that is applicable to an in-discrete analysis, as the following section will show.
Holism, relational ontologies and in-discreteness
The most obvious point of congruence between formulations of holism and in- discreteness lies in the lack of respect for apparently necessary and obvious divisions between things. In most cases the formulations do not extend beyond a circumscribed sphere such as conceptual knowledge or scientific theorising, but it is constitutive of such formulations that there not be a crisply-defined boundary around the domain of applicability – one cannot quarantine holism without risking absurdity, Fodor and Lepore’s concerns notwithstanding!209 Second, and related, is the strong emphasis on the connections between holistic elements, since it is connection that makes the holism possible. In both Quine and Wittgenstein, though more explicitly in the former, this
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Having said that, I do not intend to provide an argument for “holist” holism separately from my account of process philosophy later in this work.
conjunction of connection without division comes with an added dimension of strength or intensity, understood in two ways. First, there is an understanding that with increasing distance from a given node in the network of relations there will be some diminution of the strength with which other nodes give and receive influence. Second, even allowing for equality of “distance”, not all nodes are equal contributors to the influence on any given node – as Wittgenstein says in the example used already, some uses of the concept “number” are more directly linked to the canonical definitions than others; while Quine would allow that some concepts are more fundamental than others, and neither of these ways of thinking about varying strength of connection is a threat to holism.
Two related concerns about the diminished status of the individual can arise out of this view of massive interdependence: One is that it may prove impossible to characterise such an individual; and the other is that individuality must be lost in favour of the presumed totality. In response to the first worry, Akeel Bilgrami directs his attention to Fodor’s all-or-nothing depiction of holism as providing no resources to characterise individual mental content at all210; Donald Davidson does something similar by emphasising the sociality of linguistic practice, rather than mental content211; Jeff Malpas moves to calm worries over a form of scepticism which is claimed to be endemic to holism – a scepticism about the nature of self-knowledge212; and finally Wittgenstein’s metaphysics gives us the resources to sensibly distinguish the individual from the whole213. I will present these responses in turn before turning to briefly discuss the second worry, that the very idea of an individual is at risk in a holist metaphysic.
Fodor’s concerns about the possibility of completely unique mental content