Precis of holism: A shopper's guide

In the last fifty years, starting with the publications of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and W. V. Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," the interaction of two doctrines has shaped a lot of what is most characteristic of contemporary philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. These are: functional role semantics' and the infirmity of the analytic/synthetic distinction. Functional role semantics is the idea that the meaning of a word, or other linguistic expressions, is somehow to be identified with its role in a language system. Analogously, the content of a hypothesis is to be identified with its role in a theory, and the content of a belief is to be identified with its role in a system of thought.2 The infirmity of the analytic/synthetic (a/s) distinction is the idea, that there is no principled difference between 'definitional' and 'empirical' truth. A philosophical tradition that dates at least from Kant has it that statements like 'dogs are animals' and statements like 'oaks are deciduous', though both true, nevertheless differ in the following ways: the first is 'analytic', that is, true simply in virtue of the meanings of its constitutive terms. It is therefore true in all (logically) possible worlds and knowable a priori (loosely speaking, knowable without appeal to evidence). The second is 'synthetic,' that is, true in virtue of the meanings of its constituent terms together with the empirical facts about oak trees. It is therefore false in some logically possible worlds and knowable (only) a posteriori. Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," a watershed paper in contemporary philosophy, argued that the traditional a/s distinction is not principled. According to Quine, there is no nonquestion begging way of distinguishing