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
denotation
In linguistics and philosophy, the denotation of an expression is its literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of being warm. Denotation is contrasted with other aspects of meaning including connotation. For inst ...
s 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
Gilbert Harman (May 26, 1938 – November 13, 2021) was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton University from 1963 until his retirement in 2017. He has published widely in philosophy of language, cognitive science, philosophy of min ...
, Paul Horwich
Paul may refer to:
*Paul (given name), a given name (includes a list of people with that name)
* Paul (surname), a list of people
People
Christianity
*Paul the Apostle (AD c.5–c.64/65), also known as Saul of Tarsus or Saint Paul, early Chri ...
, Ned Block
Ned Joel Block (born 1942) is an American philosopher working in philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to the understanding of consciousness and the philosophy of cognitive science. He has been professor of philosophy and psych ...
, and Luca Incurvati Luca Incurvati is a logician and philosopher, currently an Associate Professor at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam. Incurvati's research areas include set theory, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of la ...
.
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 modu ...
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 associated ...
.
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
Proof-theoretic semantics is an approach to the semantics of logic that attempts to locate the meaning of propositions and logical connectives not in terms of interpretations, as in Tarskian approaches to semantics, but in the role that the propo ...
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
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