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Semantic Holism in Scientific Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Holger Andreas
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Extract

Whether meaning is compositional has been a major issue in linguistics and formal philosophy of language for the last 2 decades. Semantic holism is widely and plausibly considered as an objection to the principle of semantic compositionality therein. It comes as a surprise that the holistic peculiarities of scientific language have been rarely addressed in formal accounts so far, given that semantic holism has its roots in the philosophy of science. For this reason, a model-theoretic approach to semantic holism in the language of science is presented here. This approach preserves compositionality to a large extent.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 77 , Issue 4 , October 2010 , pp. 524 - 543
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on an earlier draft.

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