Online research in philosophy

Inferentialism, which I am going to present in detail in the following sections, is the view that meanings are, roughly, roles that are acquired by types of sounds and inscriptions in virtue of their being treated according to rules of our language games, roughly in the sense in which wooden pieces acquire certain roles by being treated according the rules of chess. The most important consequences are that (i) a meaning is not an object labeled (stood for, represented ...) by (...) an expression; and that (ii) meaning is normative in the sense that to say that an expression means thus and so is to say that it should be used so and so. The founding father of inferentialism is Brandom (1994; 2000). (However, nothing in this paper hinges on the fact that the version of inferentialism defended here is identical with Brandom's). This position provokes two kinds of objections. First there are general objections towards the very normativity of meaning, which do not target especially inferentialism; these I have addressed elsewhere 1. Besides this, there are objection targeted more specifically at inferentialism. Probably the most discussed specimen of such objections is the objection - repeatedly raised especially by Jerry Fodor and Ernest LePore and others - to the effect that though meanings should be compositional, the compositionality of inferential roles is unattainable. This is the kind of objection I am going to deal with here 2. (Hand in hand with this objection then go various allegations of circularity of inferentialism, which we will also discuss.) To do this, I will exploit the long-standing comparison of language to chess, as it seems particularly helpful for making the inferentialist account of language plausible3. This comparison, to be sure, has its limits beyond which it may become severely misleading; but as long as we keep them in mind, it can serve us very well. (shrink)

In this paper we first propose an exact definition of the concept of inferential role, and then go on to examine the question whether subscribing to inferentialism necessitates throwing away existing theories of formal semantics, as we know them from logic, or whether these could be somehow accomodated within the inferentialist framework. The conclusion we reach is that it is possible to make an inferentialist sense of even those common semantic theories which are usually considered as incompatible with inferentialism, such (...) as the standard semantics of second-order logic. (shrink)

In recent years, I have published a number of papers addressing various aspect of inferentialism. These papers, I believe, do provide for a relatively multifaceted picture of (my version of) this enterprise; though still a picture that is in some respects patchy. This has made me start working on this book – it should bring my ideas of various aspects and dimensions of inferentialism to a desirable synthesis. Building the individual chapters, I usually start from taking parts of my published (...) papers as basic building blocks, putting them togethether and then trying to make them fit together with each other, and with the rest of the book, seamlessly. As a result, material from the older papers gets upgraded so that the chapters no longer contain many pieces of the papers in their original form. As inferentialism is a new and unsettled matter, I am not only putting forward some new ideas, but in some cases I also have to put together new frameworks to enable me to articulate these ideas intelligibly in the first place. I think that doing this with a reasonable outcome is not possible without some feadback. I do get some from my colleagues, but I will be grateful to anybody who would like to comment on anything presented here. (shrink)

One of the recent trends in the philosophy of language and theory of meaning is the inferentialist project launched by Robert Brandom (1994, 2000, 2008), elaborating on the approach of Wilfrid Sellars (1953, 1954, 1956, 1974). According to this project, language is to be seen as essentially a rule-governed activity, providing for meaningful utterances in a way analogous to the way in which the rules of chess provide for making one's pawns, bishops or rooks attack one's opponent, checking his king (...) or castling (see Peregrin, 2008). Inferentialism is also a theory of the nature of human reason and consequently of the nature of man, hence an ambitious project. Independently of how realistic these ambitions are, it is of a profound interest that many of the ideas of contemporary general semantic inferentialism were already tabled and discussed within the philosophy of law. Some of them were used to account for the semantics of legal discourse just like they are now used to account for discourse more generally and hence their current employment can be seen as mere generalization; others were submitted to illustrate the fact that legal discourse is specific rather than continuous with the ordinary one. In this paper we would like to survey two such discussions; before presenting the example of the former kind, we will mention one of the latter kind. We will try to show how the legal theorists anticipated current discussions in the field of the philosophy of language and that given the current constellation of the debate, philosophy of language may learn many things from the philosophy of law. (shrink)

Brandom's "inferentialism"—his theory that contentfulness consists in being governed by inferential norms—proves dubiously compatible with his own deflationary approach to intentional objectivity. This is because a deflationist argument, adapted from the case of truth to that of correct inference, undermines the criterion of adequacy Brandom employs in motivating inferentialism. Once that constraint is abandoned, moreover, the very constitutive-explanatory availability of Brandom's inferential norms becomes suspect. Yet Brandom intertwines inferentialism with a separate explanatory project, one that in explaining the pragmatic significance (...) of meaning-attributions does yield a convincing construal of the claim that the concept of meaning is normative. (shrink)

This article explores how Robert Brandom's original "inferentialist" philosophical framework should be positioned with respect to the classical pragmatist tradition. It is argued that Charles Peirce's original attack (in "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man" and other early papers) on the use of "intuition" in nineteenth-century philosophy of mind is in fact a form of inferentialism, and thus an antecedent relatively unexplored by Brandom in his otherwise comprehensive and illuminating "tales of the mighty dead." However, whereas Brandom stops short (...) at a merely "strong" inferentialism, which admits some non-inferential mental content (although it is parasitic on the inferential and can only be "inferentially articulated"), Peirce embraces a total, that is, "hyper-," inferentialism. Some consequences of this difference are explored, and Peirce's more thoroughgoing position is defended. (shrink)

s effort to examine the prospects of inferentialism (inspired by Wilfrid Sellars’ work) is examined in terms of the uncertainties of contemporary philosophy and Brandom’s reading of selected prominent figures in the history of philosophy. The very idea of there being anything like a set of rules governing non-deductive inference (inferentialism) is problematic; so is Brandom’s reading of the figures he has selected in order to illuminate his own proposal along historical lines. We never quite learn how inferentialism bears on (...) the trajectory of Eurocentric philosophy and what the corrective is that Brandom advocates. Key Words: concept • history • inferentialism • postmodernism • pragmatism • rule. (shrink)

Inferentialism is explained as an attempt to provide an account of meaning that is more sensitive (than the tradition of truth-conditional theorizing deriving from Tarski and Davidson) to what is learned when one masters meanings.

In the course of developing a semantics with epistemological intent, Brandom claims that his inferentialism is Hegelian. This paper argues that, even on a charitable reading, Brandom is an anti-Hegelian.