Peter Pagin Is the principle of semantic compositionality compatible with the principle of semantic holism? The question is of interest, since both principles have a lot that speaks for them, and since they do seem to be in conflict. The view that natural languages have compositional structure is almost unavoidable, since linguistic communication by means of new combinations of words would be virtually incomprehensible otherwise. And holism too seems generally plausible, since the meaning of an expression is directly connected with (...) the way that expression interacts with other. (shrink)

Words stand for things of various kinds and for various kinds of things. Because words do this, the sentences made up of words mean what they do, and are capable of expressing our thoughts, our beliefs and conjectures, desires and wishes. This simple idea seems right to me, but it flies in the face of formidable authority. In a famous passage in “Reality without Reference,” Donald Davidson criticizes what he calls the “building-block theory:”.