Inferentialism and the Normativity of Meaning

Abstract

There may be various reasons for claiming that meaning is normative, and additionally, very different senses attached to the claim. However, all such claims have faced fierce resistance from those philosophers who insist that meaning is not normative in any nontrivial sense of the word. In this paper I sketch one particular approach to meaning claiming its normativity and defend it against the antinormativist critique: namely the approach of Brandomian inferentialism. However, my defense is not restricted to inferentialism in any narrow sense for it encompasses a much broader spectrum of approaches to meaning, connected with the Wittgensteinian and especially Sellarsian view of language as an essentially rulegoverned enterprise; and indeed I refrain from claiming that the version of inferentialism I present here is in every detail the version developed by Brandom.

Las lógicas y los lógicos

“…Otra opción que Moretti permite considerar al incorporar el papel de la comunidad es la de J. Peregrin (2012Peregrin ( , 2013 quien esboza una idea que toma como base la dimensión social de la normatividad para de esta manera intentar mostrar de qué manera la lógica establece directivas sobre cómo manejar nuestras creencias. Este autor cuestiona el enfoque individualista característico del paradigma del argumento válido ya que, según su perspectiva, las creencias son en primer lugar una actividad social, y sólo en segundo lugar se constituyen como una actividad individual.…”

Building bridges with words: an inferential account of ethical univocity

“…This is what the inferential normativist does for questions of meaning. According to normativism, ‘semantic claims do not talk about ‘normative entities’ attached to expressions, they prescribe how to handle the expression in the proper way’ (Peregrin 2012, 97). So, if we judge that some distant community uses a term with the same meaning as one of our own, we’re not thereby describing some regularity or disposition or set of transcendent rules for that community.…”

Assessing Concept Possession as an Explicit and Social Practice

“…For reason of space, we cannot provide a defence of inferentialism here. For arguments in support of it and responses to criticism, see Jorgensen (), Peregrin (, ) and Murzi and Steinberger (). The reader of this paper is free to interpret our central claims in a conditional fashion: if Brandom's inferentialism is correct, then we acquire a clear‐cut understanding of why the assessment of tests at school may mislead teachers, and we have a suggestion for a remedy at hand.…”