Inferentialism

Inferentialism seeks to explain meaning not in terms of denotation but in terms of the inferential connections between sentences and the role of terms in those sentences in explaining those connections. Its most famous exponent is Robert Brandom, but it is also found in some of the works of Frege, Carnap and Wittgenstein, if not earlier. The workshop aims to gain greater insight into the viability of inferentialism not just for logical expressions (logical inferentialism) but more broadly for non-logical expressions; to explore the connections between inferentialism and proof-theoretic semantics on the one hand and conceptual role semantics on the other; and to understand the normative aspect that inferential connections bring to the notion of meaning.