Philosophers of mind and language in the analytic tradition divide into atomists and holists. The ambition of the atomists is to explain, as they often put it, how the mind works and how language works. The holists doubt that this is a fruitful project, because they think it a mistake to treat mind and language as entities that have either elementary parts, or a structure, or inner workings. They do not believe that there are things called “beliefs” or “meanings” into which minds and languages can be broken up. Atomists, holists believe, fail to realize that rationality – the thing that makes us special – is a social phenomenon, not one that a human organism can exhibit all by itself.

This quarrel has metaphilosophical implications. Atomists prefer to think of philosophy as a quasi-scientific, problem-solving discipline. They see themselves as collaborating with cognitive scientists in order to find out facts about the capabilities of the human organism – facts that can be studied without reference to history. But if, like the holists, you think of rationality in social-practice terms, you will try instead to explain how certain organisms managed to become rational by telling stories about how various different practices came into being. You will be more interested in historical change than in neurological arrangements.

Atomists and holists agree that what makes human beings special is their possession of mind and language. They also agree that the big problem is to explain the existence of mind and language without appealing to the sort of non-physical entities postulated by Plato, Augustine, and Descartes.