Chelsey's Post

This is from Soames' "Philosophical Analysis", roughly pages 20-22, where he discusses Quines' holistic verificationist view of meaning. Which runs as follows (hopefully!?...):

1. If verification is holistic, then if meaning is verification, then it is also holistic.
2. If individual sentences don't have meanings on their own and no sentence is immune from revision, then most sentences don't have predictive content in isolation.
3. Individual sentences don't have meanings on their own, because any sentence can be held true in the face of any experience.
4. No sentence is immune from revision, because given any theory T incorporating S a synonymous theory T could be constructed incorporating ~S.
5. So, most sentences don't have predictive content in isolation.
6. If most sentences don't have predictive content in isolation, then verification is holistic.
7. So, verification is holistic.
8. So, if meaning is verification then it is also holistic.
9. Meaning is verification.
10. Therefore, meaning is holistic.

There are a number of ways, that I can see that someone could counter this argument. One would be to deny premise 9., otherwise known as one of the tenants of logical positivism. But the one that seems to be the most glaringly false is premise 2. If we are to consider it's negation:

If individual sentences have meanings on their own and sentences are immune from revision, then most sentences have predictive content in isolation.

This does not seem right to me. Why does this follow? (a comment on this from someone would be great). Given the way this conditional is written, if the consequent is ever false, that the predictive content of a sentence is not in isolation, then the whole conditional is false. But, it seems plausible to suppose that the predictive content of a sentence could be considered as being both in isolation and not. If this is the case, then the rest of then the sub-conclusion in 5., cannot run accordingly.