Alberto Peruzzi

The paper deals with three sources of holistic arguments: confirmation of scientific theories, translation between languages, and the relationships of meaning with belief. Certain difficulties of each of the involved versions of holism are pointed out: such difficulties concern the lack of evidence in support of holistic theses, as well as the presence of slippery slope arguments, and finally inconsistencies, in holism. We argue that the dualism of atomism and holism is just a polarization of a much richer spectrum of cohesiveness levels, and that their consideration is needed in order to provide explanatory power to naturalistic epistemology. In the end, the features of a "local" alternative to holism are sketched, taking into account the role of gestaltic schemata in making stable reference possible.

The principle of compositionality (PC) claims that the meaning of a compound expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the way they compose. Is it true or false? Does it apply to both natural and formalised languages? In order to answer, we must examine various formal versions of PC, the notion of meaning and the patterns of composition. Moreover, further principles are called for to determine its import and, in particular, its relationships with the Context Principle, which seems to be inconsistent with PC. The paper deals with some aspects of the issues involved, by considering both empirical and model-theoretic results on compositionality obtained in recent years. The main thesis is that only if the parametric form of PC is acknowledged, the above questions can receive a definite answer. To this aim, the paper makes the conditions for the consistency of PC with context-dependence explicit. Such conditions allow for the stability of a schematic conceptual/epistemic core, in contrast with the slippery slope leading to holistic pragmatism.

An excursus is carried out through the principal steps in the development of the theory of descriptions (TD) from B. Russell until now, and its most important advantages and disadvantages are sketched. TD is studied in the context of model theory (in A. Robinson's style), taking preservation and classification theorems based on normal forms into consideration. Finally, the categorical formulation of TD in topos theory, starting from M. Fourman and D. Scott, is presented with reference to sheaves.