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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Inferentialist pragmatism provides an alternative foundation for semantics by grounding truth in inferential practice rather than grounding inference in a prior notion of truth.

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Inferential norms themselves presuppose content: to assess whether an inference is 'good', we must already grasp what the premises and conclusion mean.
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    • 2.If meaning is constituted by inferential role, the normativity of inference cannot be explained without a prior account of representational content, as Fodor and Lepore argue against Brandom.
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    • 3.This circularity means inferentialism cannot provide a genuine foundation for semantics—it relocates, rather than eliminates, the dependence on a prior semantic notion.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Tarski's truth-conditional semantics demonstrates that a formally precise, philosophically tractable theory of meaning can be grounded in truth without appealing to inferential practice.
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    • 2.Davidson's extension of Tarskian semantics to natural language shows that compositional truth conditions explain the productivity and systematicity of language in ways that inferential-role accounts have not matched.
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    • 3.The inferentialist reversal of explanatory order sacrifices this formal rigor and compositionality without demonstrating that inferential practice can discharge the same explanatory obligations.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Classical semantics assumes a prior grip on the notion of truth and uses truth to explain what good inference consists in.
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    • 2.Inferentialist pragmatism reverses this order of explanation by starting with a practical distinction between good and bad inferences.
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    • 3.In inferentialist pragmatism, talk about truth is understood as talk about what is preserved by good inferential moves.
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