Quine in the contemporary philosophy of language is widely known for breaking the age of old semantic tradition characterized by the atomistic approach to language and meaning. He develops an alternative approach or a model in semantics which shows how meaning works holistically. To establish this, he offers arguments which are cogent, systematic and exhaustive. Quine's idea of meaning holism thus assumes a rigorous theoretical basis. The objective of this presentation is to give a systematic representation of his theoretical basis in order to arrive at Quine's conception of meaning holism.

The theoretical basis of Quine's meaning holism consists of three major arguments. They are: his refutation of analytic-synthetic distinction, his exegesis of verifiability theory of meaning and the idea of interanimation of sentences which Quine talks about while explaining the process of learning language by us. These three arguments together form Quine's theory of meaning holism.

The aim of the first argument, namely, the rejection of analytic-synthetic distinction is to prepare the ground for meaning holism to be considered as a viable option for explaining the semantic behavior of language. The presence of analytic-synthetic distinction creates obstacle to meaning holism because the notion of analyticity claims that there are sentences that are true by virtue of meanings and thus they are necessary and a priori. This way the analytic sentences confirm to atomistic theory of meaning because the meaning ascribed to these sentences is decided individually, i.e., independently of any other sentences.

The second argument concerns with Quine's critique of verifiability theory of meaning. In Quine's objection the fallacy of logical positivists is that sentences cannot be verified individually because sentences are related to other sentences and thereby they form a corporate body of sentences. Thus, the semantic thrust of verifiability theory is wrong. The third argument is Quine's idea of interanimation of sentences which he develops along with his indeterminacy of translation.

We shall discuss Quine's meaning holism mainly in the light of these three interrelated arguments. Quine's argument for meaning holism can be found in various places of his work. But among these his essay on Two Dogmas of Empiricism and his Word and Object are the most important for our present discussion. In our presentation, we will mainly focus on these works.

Quine's thesis on meaning holism cannot be presented as a linguistic thesis only, because it also has an epistemological thrust. While formulating meaning holism he considers logical positivists as his target of attack. This is evident from his first two arguments, namely, rejection of analytic-synthetic distinction and the critique of verificationist theory of meaning. The epistemic import of analytic-synthetic distinction is that it supports an epistemological perspective, namely, foundationalism which positivists advocate as the part of their theory of knowledge. Similarly, verificationist theory of meaning defends a particular form of relationship regarding how a theory is related to the world. In epistemic terms this leads to reductionism. Quine's third argument on meaning holism is presented along with his thesis on indeterminacy of translation. Indeterminacy of translation is an extension of his critique of verificationist theory of meaning which has the same epistemological bearing. In our approach to Quine's meaning holism we thus consider it not as a bare semantic thesis but project it as a semantic thesis with an epistemological underpinning. In Quine, the connection between meaning holism and epistemology follows from the connection between language and epistemology. This is particularly true in view of Quine's critique of the positivist theory of language and the theory of knowledge that is directly linked with it. With these introductory remarks concerning the thrust of our discussion to be undertaken in this presentation we will now go into the main body of our discussion.