 Selim Berker (2007) has challenged the particularist argument from holism in another way. He argues that the conjunction of holism with what he calls the particularist’s “noncombinatorialism” about the ways reasons combine to fix an overall verdict leaves the particularist with no coherent notion of a reason for action. To understand noncombinatorialism, one must first understand the idea of a “combinatorial function”. A combinatorial function takes as input all the reasons and their valences in a given situation and gives the rightness or wrongness of actions in that situation as an output. Noncombinatorialism simply asserts that the combinatorial function for reasons cannot be finitely expressed (and so, in particular, is not additive). Berker argues that particularists are committed to noncombinatorialism, but that this leaves them with no coherent notion of a reason for action. Particularists typically gloss being a reason as “counting in favour” of that for which the consideration is a reason. Berker’s point is that talk of a consideration “counting in favour” of something is itself hard to make intelligible once we abandon a combinatorial conception of how reasons combine to fix an overall verdict. We are left with a metaphor that cannot be cashed out in any helpful way. Particularists could of course abandon the noncombinatorial conception of reasons, but Berker argues that this would commit them to the truth of numerous exceptionless principles, thus compromising their particularism. (For critical discussion of Berker’s argument, see Lechler 2012.)