Directival theory of meaning (DTM) is a semantic theory developed by Polish philosopher and logician Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz in the early thirties (Ajdukiewicz 1931, 1934). The core idea of the DTM is that the so-called directives – understood as certain linguistic rules that direct members of a given linguistic community to linguistically behave in a particular way – underlie the meaning of a given language. The set of all directives in a given language constitutes its inferential profile that can be reconstructed in a language matrix. The meaning of any expression in a language is understood, then, as its place in such a matrix. Thus, instead of thinking about the meaning as primarily fixed by terms’ reference, the DTM allows thinking about the meaning as fixed by the place of the expression in the whole structure of a language. In that spirit, the DTM can be seen as a progenitor – though unfortunately mostly neglected – of highly fashionable holistic semantic theories of the second half of the 20th century, such as inferentialism or functional role semantics. In my talk, I am going to show why the DTM should be understood as a holistic approach to meaning and argue that it has certain merits that seem prima facie advantageous to the more popular holistic approaches to meaning.