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 a word or expression is its strictly literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of having high temperature. Denotation is contrasted with other aspects of meaning in ...
s are the primary sort of meaning.
Overview
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a 19th-century German idealist. His influence extends across a wide range of topics from metaphysical issues in epistemology and ontology, to political philosophy and t ...
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". His work has had a profou ...
.
Contemporary proponents of semantic inferentialism include Robert Brandom, Gilbert Harman, Paul Horwich, 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 psychol ...
, and Luca Incurvati.
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor ( ; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American philosopher and the author of works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of min ...
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 associ ...
.
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
In logic, the semantics of logic or formal semantics is the study of the meaning and interpretation of formal languages, formal systems, and (idealizations of) natural languages. This field seeks to provide precise mathematical models tha ...
, which associate meaning with the reasoning process.
References
External links
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Theories of deduction
Theories of language
Semantics
Philosophy of language
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