Abstract
In this paper, I show how normative inferentialism could be used to explain several phenomena related to natural languages. First, I show how the distinction between the inferential potential and the inferential significance fits the standard distinction between the meaning of a sentence and the content of an utterance. Second, I show how the distinction could be used to explain ambiguity and free pragmatic enrichment from the perspective of normative inferentialism. The aim of this paper is to establish theoretical foundations that enable normative inferentialism to enter the discussions within the literalism-contextualism debate. As I argue, the biggest advantage of inferentialism is that it provides one general framework for the representation of meaning/content that naturally incorporates contextual information and so it can be used to represent meanings of various types of context-dependent sentences.
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Notes
Beside Travis and Recanati, Searle (1992) also belongs among the proponents of contextualism. Other examples of the influence of context on content can be found in Rumelhart (1993). Besides that, neo-Gricean approaches (Carston 2002; Sperber and Wilson 1986; Wilson and Sperber 2004) are often considered to be on the side of contextualism as well. However, see Carston (2010, 2012) for a discussion on the position of relevance theory with regard to the distinction between literalism and contextualism.
This does not necessarily mean that there is no connection between language and the world. In this matter, I follow Sellars (1974) and beside intra-linguistic transitions, I accept language entry (a speaker responds linguistically to a perceptual situation) and language exit (a speaker responds behaviorally to a linguistic activity) transitions as well. The view that language entry and language exit transitions, together with intra-linguistic (sentence to sentence) transitions, constitute semantic competence might even have some support in neurolinguistics—see, e.g., Marconi (1997); Marconi et al. (2013); Calzavarini (2017).
Note that this is not to say that meaning depends on all inferences in which a sentence can appear. This point is especially important with regard to the objection against inferentialism stated by Fodor and Lepore (2001, 2007). See Brandom (2007), Drobňák (2017), and Peregrin (2014, pp. 57–60) for a response and a specification of meaning-constitutive inferences.
The assumption that each half of the pair can represent the whole pair is supported by Tennant (2003). Within the proof-theoretic semantics, this kind of relation between the introduction rules (M←) and the elimination rules (M→) is discussed under the label ‘the harmony principle’. See Francez (2015, pp. 80–92) for a general discussion.
The fact that we chose M→ (the elimination rules) over M← (the introduction rules) does not mean that we assume the primacy of the elimination rules – the view that Francez (2015, 41) labels ‘pragmatism’. We chose M→ for practical reasons, as we think that it can better show the influence of context on the content of an analyzed sentence/utterance. Despite that, we stay indifferent to the fundamental question of which set of rules (if any) is primary/self-justified.
The abbreviated form ‘set of ordered pairs’ will be used henceforth. The sets of ordered pairs can be further divided into subsets which can consist of one or more ordered pairs.
Omitting the fact that the world is fictional.
That is not done very often by contextualists as they consider the contextual modulation of the meanings of particular words/predicates to be more important (or interesting) than a subsequent representation of meaning on the level of sentences. The idea is that if we contextually modulate the meanings of particular expressions, then the representation of meaning can continue standardly (whatever we take to be a standard representation of meaning).
Alternatively, we could coin a new term and call the inferential significance, as understood in this paper, the actual inferential potential or the inferential potential for a particular context. Not much hinges on the terminology as long as we distinguish the current understanding of the inferential significance from Peregrin’s previous proposal.
If we apply this view on logical vocabulary, then it implies some version of logical pluralism. For example, it may turn out that the inferential potential of a negated sentence includes separate ordered pairs for classical negation and intuitionistic negation in some natural language. This may seem to be a surprising consequence as inferentialism is often linked to intuitionistic logic. However, it is important to emphasize that the view presented in this paper is specifically designed for natural languages and it is supposed to have no implications for debates in logic. From our perspective, it is acceptable that the ordinary use of sentences that include logical vocabulary can be in accordance with different logical systems in different contexts. It is a matter of empirical research to decide how rich inferential potentials of such sentences actually are. At the same time, this is not to say that natural language should have some primacy over formal languages or that we should be logical pluralists when debating (formal) advantages of different logical systems. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
I understand that there are many theoretical issues related to the rich meaning approach that must be answered (e.g., how we acquire rich meanings, how we understand each other, and what the boundaries of semantic competence are) and, as a matter of fact, I believe that normative inferentialism has a potential to answer them. However, in this paper, I would like to focus on the advantages that the inferential representation of meaning provides with respect to its particular applications. With respect to this aim, the inferential representation of meaning can be seen as a useful tool for representing meaning, regardless of whether normative inferentialism as a whole turns out to be a coherent rich meaning approach.
See, e.g., Gillon (1990) for a discussion of the standard view on ambiguity.
Note that this is only a toy example which aims to demonstrate how two “meanings” can be represented within one inferential potential. The full inferential potential of that sentence would consist of a much bigger number of ordered pairs.
Because of that, I use quotation marks when I am writing about both/two “meanings” in this subsection. The quotation marks are supposed to suggest that we can talk about two (or more) meanings only from the perspective of the traditional view on ambiguity, but not from the perspective of normative inferentialism.
The validity judgment tasks focus primarily on how particular expressions differ in patterns of inferential practices of speakers. For example, Guerts et al. (2010) compare inferential patterns for the comparative modifiers ‘more than n’, ‘less than n’, ‘at least n+1’, and ‘at most n–1’. For now, I leave it open whether focusing on the inferential patterns of particular expressions might answer worries regarding the inferential view on compositionality.
Another way to test the prediction of inferentialism regarding ambiguity might be to use the resources of distributive semantics (e.g., Lenci 2008; Turney and Pantel 2010) and to look for co-occurrences of words within corpora. An attempt to show how distributive semantics could be linked to inferentialism can be found in Ocelák (2016). However, as Ocelák noted, corpora do not provide sufficient resources for tracking co-occurrences of sentences. So the methodology of distributive semantics should be modified in some way if we want to use it for reconstructing inferential potentials. One way to achieve this goal would be to provide an inferential view on compositionality that would apply to empirical vocabulary. It is a matter of future development whether such a modification will take place.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer, Jaroslav Peregrin, and participants of The second Context, Cognition and Communication Conference in Warsaw for their comments that allowed me to significantly improve the present paper.
Funding
This work was supported by the Philosophical Faculty, University of Hradec Králové, where the author currently holds the position of Junior Researcher and by the Specific Research Grant “Empirical Grounds of Inferentialism.”
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Drobňák, M. Inferentialism on Meaning, Content, and Context. Acta Anal 35, 35–50 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-019-00394-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-019-00394-0