Meaning, Communal Use and Deference to Experts

Abstract

It is hardly controversial that laypeople have little-to-no knowledge concerning the actual meaning of such specialist terms as “boson” or “sarcoidosis” (at best, they can say that sarcoidosis is a disease and boson is some particle.) It has been convincingly shown (Burge, 1979, 1986, 1988, 1989, 2003; Putnam, 1973, 1975, 1978) that not the community as a whole, but rather relevant experts play an essential role in determining the meaning of such specialist terms. Normative inferentialism, an important alternative to more traditional representational semantics, is an essentially social theory that emphasizes the role a linguistic community as a whole plays in determining linguistic meaning: Communal inferential rules are constitutive of expressions’ meanings. To date, inferentialists have largely ignored highly specialised discourses. This article fills that gap. I argue that the normative inferentialist can account for highly specialised discourses in a manner that respects Burgean insights concerning the critical role of the relevant experts in determining linguistic meaning. The result stems naturally from the central point of inferentialism: The game of giving and asking for reasons.