<Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This section does not cite any sources . Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources . Unsourced material may be challenged and removed . (May 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) </Td> </Tr> </Table> <Tr> <Td> </Td> <Td> This section does not cite any sources . Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources . Unsourced material may be challenged and removed . (May 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) </Td> </Tr> <P> If semantic holism is interpreted as the thesis that any linguistic expression E (a word, a phrase or sentence) of some natural language L cannot be understood in isolation and that there are inevitably many ties between the expressions of L, it follows that to understand E one must understand a set K of expressions to which E is related . If, in addition, no limits are placed on the size of K (as in the cases of Davidson, Quine and, perhaps, Wittgenstein), then K coincides with the "whole" of L . </P> <P> The many and substantial problems with this position have been described by Michael Dummett, Jerry Fodor, Ernest Lepore and others . In the first place, it is impossible to understand how a speaker of L can acquire knowledge of (learn) the meaning of E, for any expression E of the language . Given the limits of our cognitive abilities, we will never be able to master the whole of the English (or Italian or German) language, even on the assumption that languages are static and immutable entities (which is false). Therefore, if one must understand all of a natural language L to understand the single word or expression E, then language learning is simply impossible . </P>

What doctrine states that a word acquires its meaning only