In this paper I present how the normative inferentialist can make the distinction between sentence meaning and content of the utterance. The inferentialist can understand sentence meaning as a role conferred to that sentence by the rules governing inferential transitions and content of the utterance as just a part of sentence meaning. I attempt to show how such a framework can account for prominent scenarios presented by contextualists as a challenge to semantic minimalism/literalism. I argue that inferentialism can address contextualist (...) challenges in a simple and effective manner by understanding sentence meaning as broad, but invariant. (shrink)

Robert Brandom’s inferentialism notoriously entails meaning holism, which has often been seen as unacceptable because it seems to make communication impossible. This paper aims to improve Brandom’s conception of communication as “navigation-across-perspectives” to reconcile meaning holism and the possibility of communication. The conception proposed here entails keeping track of speakers’ own and the other’s scores of commitments and entitlements. I argue that the whole of commonly endorsed inferences in each practice should determine the contents of utterances and those of the (...) commitments of the participants. The local norm defined by such inferences is holistic and can make sense of each other’s commitments. Contents or meaning can be primarily determined at the level of each practice, not that of an individual, the whole community, or the objective world. (shrink)

This paper offers a general model of the semantics of lexicalized social meanings, i.e. semiotic properties of certain expressions in a socio-political context. Examples include slurs, problematically charged expressions such as inner city, as well as terms such as mother, which also carry implicit ideological associations. Insofar as their linguistic properties are concerned, social meanings can be construed as context-structuring devices: without introducing specific at-issue contents, they evoke background assumptions which shape the context of conversation. An inferentialist model of discourse (...) is developed to account for this effect, in which the discursive significance of an utterance is defined as the set of inferences it licenses relative to a discursive context. A discursive context is a set of propositions that can serve as auxiliary premises in material inferences, together with a salience ranking that makes some of these propositions more readily available and therefore more relevant to determining discursive significance. Social meanings are defined as functions on discursive contexts that modify the salience ranking, increasing the salience of certain assumptions and stereotypes. As a result, they impact the discursive significance of utterances indirectly and independently of at-issue contents. They are also largely independent of speaker intentions in virtue of the ideological nature of discursive contexts. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to establish a specific view of linguistic understanding based on the framework of normative inferentialism. Normative inferentialism is presented as an overspecification (rich) account of meaning—the meaning of a sentence is understood as a cluster of context‐dependent contents. The standard psychological mechanism responsible for reaching understanding of an utterance depends on the ability to eliminate contextually irrelevant aspects/parts of meaning. The advantages of the view are that the mechanism can (a) explain a wide range (...) of linguistic phenomena including polysemy, homonymy, and conversational implicatures, and (b) explain partial understanding of an utterance. (shrink)