Inferential role semantics (also conceptual role semantics, functional role semantics, procedural semantics, semantic inferentialism) is an approach to the theory of meaning that identifies the meaning of an expression with its relationship to other expressions (typically its inferential relations with other expressions), in contradistinction to denotationalism, according to which denotations are the primary sort of meaning.

Overview

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends ...

is considered an early proponent of what is now called inferentialism.P. Stekeler-Weithofer (2016)
"Hegel's Analytic Pragmatism"
University of Leipzig, pp. 122–4. He believed that the ground for the axioms and the foundation for the validity of the inferences are the right consequences and that the axioms do not explain the consequence. In its current form, inferential role semantics originated in the work of

Wilfrid Sellars Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 – July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States". Life and career His father ...

. Contemporary proponents of semantic inferentialism include

Robert Brandom Robert Boyce Brandom (born March 13, 1950) is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and his academic output manifests both sys ...

, Gilbert Harman, Paul Horwich, Ned Block, and Luca Incurvati.

Jerry Fodor Jerry Alan Fodor (; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modul ...

coined the term "inferential role semantics" in order to criticise it as a holistic (i.e. essentially non-compositional) approach to the theory of meaning. Inferential role semantics is sometimes contrasted to

truth-conditional semantics Truth-conditional semantics is an approach to semantics of natural language that sees meaning (or at least the meaning of assertions) as being the same as, or reducible to, their truth conditions. This approach to semantics is principally associate ...

. Semantic inferentialism is related to

logical expressivism Robert Boyce Brandom (born March 13, 1950) is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and his academic output manifests both sys ...

and semantic anti-realism. R. Ramanujam, Sundar Sarukkai (eds.), ''Logic and Its Applications'', Springer, 2009, p. 260. The approach also bears a resemblance to accounts of proof-theoretic semantics in the

semantics of logic In logic, the semantics of logic or formal semantics is the study of the semantics, or interpretations, of formal and (idealizations of) natural languages usually trying to capture the pre-theoretic notion of entailment. Overview The truth cond ...

, which associate meaning with the reasoning process.

References

External links

* Theories of deduction Theories of language Semantics Philosophy of language {{semantics-stub