Holism about meaning need not abandon reference or truth.

Evidence

Contemporary analytical philosophy of language contains theories of meaning as vigorously anti-atomistic as anything in the Saussurian tradition. In the writings of Quine, for example, language is conceived holistically, as ‘a fabric of sentences’. Yet the concepts of reference, and still more of truth are central to the single most ambitious attempt to develop a holistic theory of meaning, that of Donald Davidson. The meaning of sentences is given by their truthconditions, Davidson argues, and truth in turn is to be defined, following Tarski, by means of the concept of satisfaction, the relationship between predicates and the objects of which they are true. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 325

Categorization

• XREF: This is the analytic counterexample to Derrida’s anti-realism — Davidson combines holism and realism, showing the poststructuralist slide from holism to anti-realism is unnecessary. — connects to: Rejecting atomism need not entail abandoning the concept of reference — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 328; Holistic semantics does not require denying reference or truth, contra the post-structuralist route. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 325; Word meaning arises from relations between words, not from reference to the world.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the full argument that ‘there is more than one way out of the myth of the given’ — how far does the Davidsonian route actually serve a Marxist critique?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 325

Broader Connections

• Holistic semantics does not require denying reference or truth, contra the post-structuralist route. #corroborates (0.95) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 325
• Word meaning arises from relations between words, not from reference to the world. #expands (0.75)