Meaning holism

Willard Quine (1961, 41, 42): ‘our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body …. The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science.’ Karl Popper disagrees with Quine’s ‘meaning holism’ because ‘though every one of our assumptions may be challenged, it is quite impracticable to challenge all of them at the same time’; and ‘almost all of the vast amount of background knowledge which we constantly use in any informal discussion will, for practical reasons, necessarily remain unquestioned’ (Popper 1968, 322-3). But when any assumption is explicitly challenged, changes in the others may be implicit, and take time to unfold. Popper’s objection may be overlooking the continuity between consciousness and meaning space, which Peirce explained by means of a metaphor:

Consciousness is rather like a bottomless lake in which ideas are suspended, at different depths. Percepts alone are uncovered by the medium. The meaning of this metaphor is that those which [are] deeper are discernible only by a greater effort, and controlled only by much greater effort. These ideas suspended in the medium of consciousness, or rather themselves parts of the fluid, are attracted to one another by associational habits and dispositions,— the former in association by contiguity, the latter in association by resemblance. An idea near the surface will attract an idea that is very deep only so slightly that the action must continue for some time before the latter is brought to a level of easy discernment. Meantime the former is sinking to dimmer consciousness. There seems to be a factor like momentum, so that the idea originally dimmer becomes more vivid than the one which brought it up. In addition, the mind has but a finite area at each level; so that the bringing of a mass of ideas up inevitably involves the carrying of other ideas down. Still another factor seems to be a certain degree of buoyancy or association with whatever idea may be vivid, which belongs to those ideas that we call purposes, by virtue of which they are particularly apt to be brought up and held up near the surface by the inflowing percepts and thus to hold up any ideas with which they may be associated. The control which we exercise over our thoughts in reasoning consists in our purpose holding certain thoughts up where they may be scrutinized. The levels of easily controlled ideas are those that are so near the surface as to be strongly affected by present purposes. The aptness of this metaphor is very great.

— CP 7.554 (undated)

Any symbol which is relevant in the current situation implies, in a sense, the whole of its native meaning space; but its relevance at the moment consists in its focusing on the few ‘ideas’ that matter, and its leaving the rest in the background, in the deeper reaches of the ‘lake.’ Of the infinite number of statements which could be made at the moment, the symbol in question leaves many unsaid because they are too obvious to be worth saying, and many others unsaid because they would distract attention from the dialogic argument. The viable path of discourse or dialog avoids both the obvious and the irrelevant. But then, the various participants in the dialog may differ in their judgments of obviousness and relevance, and no one who has ears to hear will consider his own implicit judgments infallible.