Holistic theories of 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: The claim that anti-atomism need not entail anti-realism runs parallel to the strategic-essentialism question: rejecting one philosophical commitment need not force rejecting all related ones.