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, Gilbert Harman,

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 Chris ...

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 o ...

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 mo ...

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. Semantic inferentialism is related to logical expressivism 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, which associate meaning with the reasoning process.

References

External links

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