If meaning holism is true only of the "narrow" meaning used for psychological explanation (Block 1993), then communication, disagreement, change of mind etc. can be explained in terms of the "wide" truth-conditional meaning.
That President Obama has risen to the highest office is not the wider truth: America has a truly profound problem with racism.
That will be entertaining for those who like to point fingers, perplexing for those too busy to engage in the detail – and miss the wider truth revealed by the leak which forced all this into public discussion.
But for Djokovic, it gestures towards the wider truth that he is finally beginning to make up ground on Federer, if not in the affections of the public then certainly in the grand sweep of sporting history.
I hope that Confederate will not use a lie to hide the wider truth, yet my fear is that it will offer excuses for one of the most appalling episodes in our own history, and that it will give the neo-Nazis of Charlottesville and beyond another Confederate flag to bear – as if they needed more.
What these partisan arguments obscure is the wider truth that the economic and military power of Western nations is declining, while that of emerging powers and even some non-state groups, grows.
You didn't get so bogged down in particularities — the wider truths of fiction seemed to emerge naturally as you spoke.
A few cases grab the headlines, but the wider truths about unfair treatment, unpaid wages and sex, race and disability discrimination lie in the stories we don't read, the faces we don't see, and the voices we don't hear, simply because the rules have been changed to keep them quiet.
In spite of our different narrow meanings, I can communicate with a compatriot because our sentences like, say, "Pork chops are generally better in Memphis than in Portland" will have the same wide truth conditions in spite of their having different narrow meanings.
I grew up thinking that my father's distinctions and hierarchies, the absolute weight he attached to the life of the mind, reflected some wider truth about the world.
He concludes that the group embodies a wider truth about terrorism: "the capacity of small numbers of terrorist zealots to change the world, but not entirely as they would have wished or anticipated".
