Two things led to this book. The more immediate, but less important, cause was my concern about semantic, or meaning, holism. Holism has, as Jerry Fodor says, “something of the status of the received doctrine in the philosophy of language” (1987: 57). And it is urged, or taken for granted, in psychology and artificial intelligence. Yet it seemed to me, as it did to Fodor, clearly false (“crazy” was his word). So, in 1989, I set out to show this.

First, I had to show that the arguments for holism were no good. The main argument stems from Quine: The localist idea that some but not all inferential properties of a token constitute its meaning (or content) is alleged to yield an analytic-synthetic distinction with epistemologically objectionable consequences. You can accept this argument without becoming a holist, of course, if you are prepared to adopt an “atomistic” localism according to which no inferential property ever constitutes the meaning of a token. That is Fodor's path. However, atomism strikes me as implausibly extreme. Very likely, the meanings of some tokens are atomistic, but surely the meanings of others – perhaps ‘bachelor’ is an example – are not. I want to defend a “molecular” localism, according to which a few of the inferential properties of a token may constitute its meaning. I think that I can have what I want because I reject the Quinean argument: Molecular localism does not have epistemologically objectionable consequences unless it is saddled, gratuitously, with an epistemic thesis. I also reject other arguments against there being a “principled basis” for the molecular localises distinction among inferential properties.