 The Incredulous Stare. Finally, there is the plain fact that most people take it to be “obvious” that there can be changes of belief without changes of meaning, and that when I come to believe that there are four elephants in the Seattle Zoo, I haven’t changed what I mean by “Elephant”. The incredulous stare is hardly a knockdown argument (especially in philosophy), but it suggests that meaning holism comes with a substantial conceptual cost, and so requires equally substantial benefits to compensate for it.