What is meaning atomism?
Meaning atomism is a theory about the spreading of meanings within a representational system.<1> On meaning atomism about a system S, the meanings of all the representations in S can be specified completely in terms of a relatively small set of semantically atomic (or simple, primitive, basic) representations in the system. In other words, meaning atomists about a language, mind, or other system S hold that a small stock of representations in S are sufficient for defining the meaning of all the rest.<2> How small a set of atoms does meaning atomism require? For familiar natural languages, an atomist believes that syntactically complex representations (“brown cow”) are typically definable using their syntactic components (“cow”), but also believes that syntactically simple representations are typically definable. Similarly, atomists think that the meanings of mental representations “corresponding” to simple morphemes of natural language (e.g., one s idea of cows) are typically definable
