1 Introduction

Consider the meaning of terms such as “boson” or “sarcoidosis.” It is hardly controversial that laypeople have little-to-no knowledge concerning the actual meaning of such specialist terms (at best, they can say that sarcoidosis is a disease and boson is some particle.) In a series of influential works Burge (1979, 1986, 1988, 1989, 2003) and Putnam (1973, 1975, 1978) have convincingly shown that not the community as a whole, but rather relevant experts play an essential role in determining the meaning of such specialist termsFootnote 1. Normative inferentialism is a vigorously discussed view (e.g. Peregrin, 2023; Kaluziński, 2022, 2023a; Stovall, 2022; Townsend et al., 2021) in the philosophy of language and it is considered an important alternative to more traditional representational semantics. It is an essentially social theory that emphasizes the role community plays in determining linguistic meaning and claims that communal inferential rules are constitutive of expression’s meanings. So, the question arises how it is possible for the normative inferentialist to take into account Burgean insights concerning the essential role of experts in determining linguistic meaning. To date, inferentialists have been preoccupied with accounting for meaning of ordinary words (like “father” or “red”) or logical vocabulary within the inferentialist framework and have largely ignored highly specialised discourses. This article fills that gap.

In the first part of this paper, I outline the core ideas of the normative inferentialism. Second, I demonstrate how normative inferentialism can account for the linguistic community’s reliance on experts in determining the meaning of specialist terms. I argue that for specialist terms like “boson” or “sarcoidosis”, the meaning-constitutive inferential rules must resonate throughout the community of relevant experts, such as physicists or medical doctorsFootnote 2. I demonstrate that, in principle, such resonating of rules among experts can have two forms: “formal” and “spontaneous”. Third, I argue that there are in fact no two meanings of a specialist terms (one that can be attributed to laypeople and the other that can be ascribed to experts.) Furthermore, I consider what happens when one term pertains to more than one area of expertise (for example, “tomato” can pertain to multiple discourses: culinary, biological, legal.) Finally, I demonstrate that partial understanding (understanding as a matter of degree) of specialist terms among the speakers within a community can be easily accounted for within the inferentialist framework.

2 Inferentialism on Linguistic Meaning

There are two sources of contemporary normativeFootnote 3 inferentialism (Sellars, 1953, 1974, 2007; Brandom, 1994, 2000; Peregrin, 2014, 2018, 2023): (1) The philosophy of later Wittgenstein, who famously identified the meaning of an expression with its use (1967: § 43; 1969: 69), and (2) Proof-theoretic semantics (cf. Prior, 1960; Belnap, 1962; Dummett 1975; Cozzo, 1994; Francez, 2015; Peregrin, 2006, 2024; Tennant, 2007; Fouqueré & Quatrini, 2013; Warren, 2015, 2020, 2022), where it is argued that the meanings of logical connectives are determined by the rules for introducing and eliminating the connective. Importantly, contemporary normative inferentialists aim to account for linguistic meaning in general, and are not focused exclusively on logical vocabulary. They broaden the notion of inference “so that we are able to talk about inferences from situations to utterances and from utterances to actions” (Peregrin, 2014: 32)Footnote 4.

According to inferentialists, the meaning of a linguistic expression is determined by inferences (moves, transitions) of the following kinds:

α From situations to sentences: for example, there is a rule within the linguistic community that tells us that we are permitted to say “This is a tiger” when pointing to a tiger.

β From sentences to sentences: for example, there are rules within the linguistic community that allow us to infer that if “x is a tiger”, then (i) “x is an animal”, (ii) “x is not a fish”, and (iii) “x is a carnivore”.

γ From sentences to actions: for example, there are rules within the linguistic community that allow us to infer that if “x is a tiger”, then (i) “one should keep distance from x” and (ii) “one should not irritate x”.

To sum up, the meaning of a linguistic expression is determined by rules that tell us what inferences of the types α, β, and γ we are permitted, prescribed, or proscribed to make. An inferentialist understands linguistic meaning as the role an expression plays within a practice of speaking the language. That role can be seen as analogous to the role certain wooden pieces play within the practice of playing chess games. Consider, for instance, the role of a pawn. It seems to be determined by the set of rules that tell us what types of moves we are permitted, prescribed, or proscribed to make:

  • (R1) A pawn can be moved one square forward.

  • (R2) If it is the pawn’s first move, it can be moved two squares forward.

  • (R3) A pawn can capture one of the opponent’s pieces by moving diagonally forward one square to the left or right.

  • (R4) A pawn on its fifth rank may capture an enemy pawn on an adjacent file if in the previous move that pawn has moved two squares in a single move, as if the pawn had moved only one square (en passant).

  • (R5) A pawn cannot jump over any other piece.

  • (R6) When reaching its last rank, a pawn is promoted to another piece (knight, bishop, rook, or queen).

Analogous rules tell us what inferences of the types α, β, and γ we are permitted to make, and thus they determine the role a sentence, for instance, “This is a tiger”, plays within the practice of speaking a language (and since meaning is identical with that role, determine its meaning).

So, normative inferentialism takes rules to constitute meaning in virtue of our ability to track the inferential role of an expression, as given by its rules of inference. The better ability to track the inferential role, the better is our understanding of the meaning of the expression in question. This is analogous to the way that rules governing the pieces in chess determine the identity of the pieces: the rules that govern pawns on the chessboard tell us what a pawn is, by telling us how to use pawns in the game of chess.

3 Burgean Anti-Individualism as a Challenge for Inferentialism

There are multiple inferences that linguistic expression E can be inferred from, and there are multiple inferences that one can draw from E. It is important to say, at least roughly, which inferential rules are meaning-constitutive, and which are not. Consider the inference “Fido is a dog ⊢ Fido cannot enter John’s apartment”. Is such an inference meaning-constitutive? To answer that question, one must remember that inferentialism is an essentially social theory. As Peregrin (2014) claims: “a propriety, or an (implicit) rule, grows out of … attitudes resonating throughout the surrounding society (10).” The idea that rules (manifested by the speakers’ behaviour) must be widespread among the entire community of language speakers serves the purpose of delimiting the set of inferences that are actually determinative of meaning from those that are accidental to determining meaning.

For certain types of linguistic expressions, namely the ordinary ones like “chair”, inferential rules that are widespread among the members of the linguistic community are the meaning-determining ones (Peregrin, 2014:10). For other types of linguistic expressions, namely specialist terms like, things seem to be very different: laypeople may have actually very limited knowledge of any sort of inferences concerning such terms; it seems that relevant experts play a crucial role in determining the meaning of such terms. Consider the term “phosphorus”. There are very few inferential rules concerning that term that are widespread among laypeople; perhaps it is a widespread rule that one may infer “x is chemical element” from “x is phosphorus”, but it is very unlikely that many more rules are commonly known. If this is the case, then it would follow that the meaning of “phosphorus” is the same as the meaning of “cadmium” or “beryllium”, since it is very plausible that laypeople can only infer correctly “x is chemical element” from “x is cadmium (beryllium)”. So, it seems that there are no inferential rules resonating (= widespread) throughout the entire linguistic community such that would be sufficient to differentiate the meanings of such specialist terms as names of chemical elements. Since inferentialism identifies linguistic meaning with some sort of communal inferential rules, it seems challenging for it to explain how the meaning of such specialist terms – like names of chemical elements – is determined.

4 The Community of Experts

There is a possibility to reconcile the idea that the inferential rules must resonate throughout the surrounding linguistic community with the fact that there are very few inferential rules concerning these terms resonating among laypeople (and these rules are obviously insufficient to determine the actual meaning.) To tackle that issue, one needs to assume that inferential rules must resonate throughout the community of relevant experts, such as medical doctors, botanists, or astronomers. For instance, there is a high level of agreement between doctors about the symptoms of arthritis and what kind of test results can be seen as a corroboration of the hypothesis “S has arthritis”. These seem to be the inferences from situations to sentences: doctors know from what kind of situations they are permitted to infer that “S has arthritis”. Next, doctors know which inferences from sentences to sentences are correct and which are not; for example, one can infer from “S has arthritis” that “S has an inflammatory state in their joints” but cannot infer from “S has arthritis” that “S has a tapeworm”. Finally, doctors know what inferences from sentences to actions one is permitted to make; for example, one can infer from “S has arthritis” that “S should take ibuprofen”, but not “S should take penicillin”Footnote 5. To sum up, in cases of highly specialized discourses, meaning-constituting inferential rules are not those that are widespread within the community as a whole but those that are widespread within the community of relevant experts.

Precisely how scientific communities come to a consensus is a difficult issue that requires book-length elaboration on the intersection of the philosophy, the history, and the sociology of science. However, it appears to me that, generally speaking, the agreement among experts on the issue regarding which α-, β-, and γ-type of inferences are correct and which are incorrect can be found in two different forms; let me call them “formal” and “spontaneous”. One may shed some light on that issue by noticing that the rules determining the meaning of a term are established in a way similar to the way rules of games are established. In the beginning, there is some chaos, since rules for a certain type of practice are scarce and not very precise, and even there might be a case that they do not differentiate between two different types of practices (it seems that in the beginning of the 19th century rugby and footballFootnote 6 were not completely separate games). But as time goes on, some official organisations are brought to life and have a distinguished position in determining the laws of the games. From time to time, the distinguished organisations (World Rugby, Fédération Internationale des Échecs, Fédération Internationale de Basketball, Fédération Internationale de Football Association, etc.) issue an official rulebook of the relevant game. It seems that at least in some cases highly specialised discourses follow a similar patternFootnote 7.

Official institutions or organisations that play a distinguished role in determining the meaning of highly specific terms seem to be quite common. See the following passage from the web page of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC):

IUPAC is the universally-recognized authority on chemical nomenclature and terminology … As one of its major activities, IUPAC develops Recommendations to establish unambiguous, uniform, and consistent nomenclature and terminology for specific scientific fields, usually presented as: glossaries of terms for specific chemical disciplines; definitions of terms relating to a group of properties; nomenclature of chemical compounds and their classes; terminology, symbols, and units in a specific field; classifications and uses of terms in a specific field; and conventions and standards of practice for presenting data in a specific field. The Recommendations are published in the IUPAC journal, Pure and Applied Chemistry (PAC) and journal issues are freely-available in the year following their publication. They also appear in the IUPAC Standards Online database one year after publication in PAC. Information on chemical terminology can also be accessed through the IUPAC Color Books or the Brief Guides to Nomenclature.Footnote 8

One important clarification: this is not to say that some sort of official document issued by the relevant institution is a necessary condition for a word pertaining to specialised discourse to have meaning. Words that pertain to specialised discourses can have meaning due to two kinds of facts: (i) there is widespread agreement (in most cases, probably implicit) among relevant experts in the field as to which inferences of the types α, β, and γ are correct and which are not, or (ii) the inferences of the types α, β, and γ that one is permitted, prescribed, or proscribed to make are not only common among experts, but also written into the official documents of relevant expert bodies and organisations. So, the area of specialised discourse contains vocabulary that functions in a way that is characteristic of the games in their amateur or pre-institutionalised form (like chess just before codification of its rules by the FIDE in 1929, or how amateur matches are played), or it may function in a way characteristic of institutionalised games (like official tournaments under the auspices of the FIFA, FIDE, FIBA, etc.) (cf. Marmor, 2009: ch. 2). In other words, specialised discourse terms can acquire their meaning in two ways: formal (analogous to the way games are established in the institutional era) and spontaneous (analogous to the way games are established in the pre-institutional era).

5 Are there Two Meanings of the Same Term: Ordinary and Specialist Ones?

One may think that some terms have two meanings, because they occur in two types of discourses: ordinary and specialist. Consider the term “dog”. This is a widely known word. However, it also occurs in the specialised discourse of zoology. It may seem that there are two different sets of rules determining the meaning of the term “dog”. This is not the case. The only set of rules that determines the meaning is the one that is widespread among expertsFootnote 9, such as zoologists. Even in the case when there is no official document, similar to highway or penal code specifying what is prescribed, permitted, and proscribed, there are some rules resonating throughout the community of experts; they may be implicit ones that manifest in the behaviour of these experts in two ways: (a) how these experts make inferences of the types α, β, and γ, and (b) how these experts judge inferences made by other people as correct and incorrect. Now, suppose that there are two people in the visible presence of a dog. One of them points to the dog and utters, “It is a bird” or “It is a close cousin of an eagle” or “It has absolutely no colour vision”. The second person will be justified in correcting any of these utterances, regardless of whether such beliefs are widespread among laypeople. Even if all non-experts believe that dogs are colour blind, one would be justified to correct their inferences from “x is a dog” to “x is colour blind”.

Or suppose that laypeople have difficulties in distinguishing observationally between dogs and wolves. They have basically a 50% chance of being correct when they point to an animal, which actually is a dog or a wolf, and say “This is a dog”. This does not mean that they do not know the meaning of the terms “dog” and “wolf”, and instead they use some other kind of notion, say “dolf”. It would be the case if such a situation occurred among experts. Disagreement among experts is not merely a hypothetical scenario: sometimes experts disagree. Perhaps the most obvious occasion of such disagreement is when a new phenomenon occurs. Consider the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It took some time before doctors learned how to differentiate the new disease and ordinary pneumonia, but since they figured it out, there are correct and incorrect ways of identifying these diseases, and laypeople’s beliefs, attitudes, and opinions do not contribute to them.

Now, one may argue that many general physicians are still unable to clearly distinguish, for example, COVID-19 from flu, colds, and more serious cases of pneumonia, as polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests are prone to false negatives (and false positives) and the family of symptoms are closely aligned. Of course, this is true: Doctors sometimes misdiagnose patients; tests sometimes can be inaccurate. However, when I say that doctors know what inferences of type α, β, and γ we are permitted or proscribed to make, I do not mean that particular doctors always make correct judgements in certain situations. Rather, I claim that they know (implicitly or explicitly) rules for inferences of the type α, β, and γ. For a moment, think of the doctors as, for example, basketball players. It is one thing to know the rules of the game, while it is entirely another to act in accordance with the rules in specific situations. For instance, a player might be perfectly aware of the “three in the key” rule – which forbids a player from standing in the restricted area for more than three seconds – yet the player goes ahead and stands there too long during a game. As correctly claimed by Peregrin,“[W]e distinguish between the rules and the moves that we make within the framework of the rules, but how could we not? The rules and the rule-governed moves are two very different items!”(2018: 450). The meaning of linguistic expressions is determined on the level of rules, not on the level of moves; therefore, in the case of arthritis, COVID-19, or generalized anxiety disorder, the meaning of these terms is determined by, for example, official documents issued by World Health Organization concerning how to make correct inferences involving these terms. And sometimes the application of these rules by doctors, in particular cases, can be flawed.

6 Why Experts Have Distinguished Role?

The crucial question here is as follows: What are the reasons for the normative inferentialist to make such a move to restrict inferential rules that are resonating throughout the community of experts as the only meaning-determining ones (for specialist terms)? One may think that the assumption made in above, that meaning-determining rules are those inferential rules that are widespread among relevant experts, is ad hoc and not well justified. However, I firmly believe that it is not the case.

I will use the example of scientific experts, who are regarded as privileged, to explain how the inferentialist can account for expert determination of the meaning of certain terms. But it is also possible that a community could cede content determination to non-scientistsFootnote 10. So, the paragraphs below are meant to show that normative inferentialism can recognize that there is a place for the community to cede determination to experts, and I give the case of science as a striking example where such deference has taken place (generally) over the course of modernity.

Let me remind you that the crucial role in normative inferentialism is attributed to the game of giving and asking for reasons (Brandom, 1994, Chap. 1): It is claimed that utterances interlocutors make directly affect the normative sphere. The central role of the game of giving and asking for reasons within the inferentialist framework has been aptly summarised by Salis:

According to normative pragmatics when we advance a certain claim C, whose content depends on a number of inferences, we undertake a special set of responsibilities concerning C: we are committed to having good grounds for uttering C and to accepting what follows from C. When challenged about C we can show that we have reasons that support it, and so we are entitled to it. The practice of advancing, challenging, and defending claims is the game of giving and asking for reasons. (2019, p. 501)

It is important to notice that

since this is not a representationalist conception of assertion and language is not understood as a denotational device, this game is rather a sort of “contentless general scheme” for endorsing, challenging, and eventually rejecting assertive moves bearing all kinds of content. (2019, p. 503)

So, when one makes an assertion that p, one is committed to having good grounds for asserting that p. The question arises: what counts as “good grounds for p”? It is crucial to notice that certain kinds of reasons in the game of giving and asking for reasons are considered good, and certain other kinds are considered bad. Generally speaking, contemporary societies value expertise and regard arguments provided by experts as very good ones. It is quite clear that some terms are used in the game of giving and asking for reasons only by a tiny fraction of the population. For instance, the name of the chemical element with atomic number 116 is ”Livermorium”, a term laypeople do not generally use in their discourse (in fact, the vast majority of them would likely have considerable difficulty determining whether it is a chemical element, a new car brand or the Latin name for some lizard). It is straightforward that only the inferential rules concerning “Livermorium” that are common among experts are meaning-determining (because there are no such rules resonating among laypeople). But in the case of many other terms, there is one set of rules that resonate among laypeople, and there is another set of rules that resonate among experts. These sets of rules can vary greatly. What happens in such circumstances? Consider the following dialogue:

  • A: You’ve added tomato to the sauce! I’ve told you that I hate vegetables!

  • B: The tomato is technically a fruit!

It may seem funny, but it gives us a hint of the superiority of scientific discourse over ordinary discourse. In botany, a fruit is the seed-bearing structure in flowering plants that is formed from the ovary after flowering, so the tomato is a fruit, regardless of the fact that in the culinary context it is treated as a vegetable and eaten with the main dish, not as a dessert. However, no one can say that speaker B is wrong about the status of tomato.Footnote 11 This is the case because scientific arguments trump “ordinary” and “common sense” ones in the game of giving and asking for reasons. One cannot say “Botanists are wrong about the tomato, because my grandma (cousin, colleague, etc.) uses that word differently than them” without provoking a laugh, rolling eyes or disbeliefFootnote 12. Or, more generally, the way experts (not necessarily scientists) use a term in the game of giving and asking for reasons is privileged over the way laypeople use the same termFootnote 13.

Note that in the game of giving and asking for reasons, when we make an assertion that p, we undertake a commitment to having good grounds for that assertion. That commitment is universal across the community, time, place etc. However, what counts as good grounds for an assertion can vary, depending on such things as historical era and discursive context. If I am talking with a friend and I make a claim concerning electrons, then an article in Scientific American counts as good grounds for my claim, but if two particle physicists are talking about electrons, that can raise the bar significantly: without referring to a ton of maths and multiple experiments, one may not be treated as having good grounds for one’s claim.

The route to the distinguished status of experts comes via the crucial point of normative inferentialism, namely the game of giving and asking for reasons: some reasons — those provided by the relevant experts — are the good ones. At some time, contemporary societies have come to an implicit agreement that in some discourses certain people — experts — have a distinguished role. And someday they may easily strip them of their status. Normative inferentialism claims that the meaning of some terms (tomato, thorium, planet, etc.) is determined by inferential rules (broadly construed), though these rules need not be resonating among the entire society but they may be widespread only among relevant experts. The linguistic community as a whole just ceded the determination of meaning for some parts of the language they speak to the relevant experts. In the game of giving and asking for reasons, there is a clear asymmetry of reasons: scientific ones (or, more generally, expert’s reasons) are those that, in general, contemporary societies value the most. Correction of inference coming from the position of a relevant expert is appropriate, but common-sense correction of inference cannot be seen as overriding expert’s correction.

Before I move forward, let me just note that Putnam’s (1975) claim that he knows only one thing about the meaning of “elm” – that it is a deciduous tree – is clearly false from the inferentialist perspective, which is holistic. If one knows that an elm is a tree, then one also knows that it has branches, roots and a trunk; that it needs soil, water and sun to grow; that it can be used in the fireplace or to produce logs, etc. Additionally, one knows a lot of “negative inferential rules”: “x is an elm ⊢ x is not a maple”, “x is an elm ⊢ x is not an aeroplane”, “x is an elm ⊢ x is not an oak”, “x is an elm ⊢ x is not a mammal”, “x is an elm ⊢ x is not a flower” etc. So, it might be said that when one knows inferential rules like the ones mentioned above, one has a basic understanding of the term “elm”, sufficient for using it meaningfully in sentences. How well one understands a term, and whether one’s assertions are factually correct, can be checked by relevant experts (dynamics of such “expert trials” are elaborated in Kaluziński, 2023a).

7 The Nature of Deference-Rule

It might be instructive to think of the layperson’s game of giving and asking for reasons as being governed by a deference-rule stating that, when the meaning of a term pertaining to highly specialised discourses is discussed, it is appropriate to defer to the relevant experts. As Peregrin (2014) noted, “the existence of a rule may be documented by three kinds of behavioral regularities:

  • complying with the rule (e.g. avoiding chief’s food);

  • correcting those who do not comply (e.g. beating those who do not avoid chief’s food);

  • explicitly endorsing the rule (e.g. saying that one should avoid chief’s food)” (74–75).

While there are naturally exceptions to every rule, we can generally say that a rule prescribing deference to experts exists in contemporary societies. First, people actually comply with such a rule in most cases; they look for relevant entries in an encyclopaedia (or, nowadays, on Wikipedia), ask their doctors for opinions, consult handbooks and so forth. Second, in general, when a non-expert claims that they know the meaning of, say, “boson” better than experts do, they will receive some sort of push-back, which can be subtle, such as raising one’s eyebrows or rolling one’s eyes. Third, many people actually make explicit statements endorsing such deference-rule, such as “You should ask physicists!”, “Look it up in the handbook” and the like.

Rules that are constitutive of meaning are those inferential rules that are common among experts. The deference-rule is neither inferential, nor constitutive of meaning. It governs our ordinary practice of exchanging reasons. So, if one is not (for instance) a particle physicist talking about electrons or a doctor talking about arthritis, then one is bound by that deference-rule. That rule does not apply to experts talking about their field of expertise. Alternatively, one can say that this rule also applies to experts, but since they are experts, then they defer to themselves. The former claim seems to be less complicated, but in the end, there might not be much practical difference between these two claims.

One may argue that the COVID-19 pandemic cast doubts on the existence of such a deference-rule, but I am convinced that this is not the case. After all, committed anti-vaxxers constitute a tiny proportion of the population; the majority of the world’s population was eventually fully vaccinated, while those who were extremely reluctant to comply with experts’ opinions about COVID-19 received some push-back, and many people stated explicitly that one should follow the experts’ opinions about the matter. Thus, if a problem exists, it is not a problem pertaining to the existence of a rule prescribing deference to experts, but rather some type of problem with the efficiency of vaccines: In order to be fully effective in terms of providing herd immunity, an unusually high percentage of the population needs to be compliant, and it is extremely difficult to ensure over 90% of people will comply with anything. I am inclined to consider that most (but clearly not all) debates concerning COVID-19 are not examples of violations of the deference-rule, but are practical examples of the game of giving and asking for reasons: People want to ensure that the experts have good reasons for their claims. Thus, while we do not consider experts to be infallible, we do consider their reasoning to be superior to “commonsense”, and we treat experts as people who are in a better position to recognise good reasons due to their expertise.

8 Overlapping Areas of Expertise

One may be concerned that, if one says that “tomato” has one meaning for botanists and another for cooks, then one might also say that there is no agreement in use across the entire community, and hence no coherent meaning. However, this is clearly not what I am saying in this paper. I claim that what determines the linguistic meaning of a specialist term t is not agreement across the entire community concerning the inferential rules involving t, but the agreement among groups of relevant experts concerning the inferential rules. It has recently been shown that inferentialism can naturally understand linguistic meaning as “rich” or “broad” in the sense that there is one linguistic meaning, which can contain multiple contextual bits (Drobňák, 2020; Kaluziński, 2022); thus, in the case of “tomato”, there is one meaning of the term that has two contextual bits: botanical and culinaryFootnote 14. One should then differentiate between two types of situations: (I) when experts do not have a uniform opinion, and (II) when there are two different types of experts among whom there is a more or less uniform opinion. Even if experts do not have a uniform opinion, it does not necessarily follow that a term has no meaning, as the meaning of a disputed term can be underdeterminedFootnote 15.

There is one more issue I want to undertake at this moment: Science is understood in this paper as an enterprise that offers us the best ways to grasp how things really are. As pointed out by Sellars: “[E]mpirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once” (1956: 300). However, I must stress that the distinguished position of science is not universal to every discourse. Sometimes there are different areas of expertise that are overlapping. Consider one more time a dialogue on the tomato in the dish. I have said that it is funny, but why does that sense of comedy arise? It is probably because B’s response is totally correct and yet completely irrelevant at the same time. When we participate in the game of giving and asking for reasons, scientists have the “golden ticket” only when we are concerned about how things really are, what the structure of reality is, what laws govern the world surrounding us, etcetera. On other occasions, deferring to experts other than scientists might be a better idea. Consequently, when B defers to the experts – botanists – B chooses the wrong experts in this context; the correct experts would be chefs. It appears that there is some context-sensitivity in the issue of who the relevant experts are (cf. Engelhardt, 2019). If we are actually interested in the issue of what tomatoes are, then we should defer to botanists. However, if we are interested in eating a tasty meal, we should defer to chefs. Therefore, in the kitchen I could not care less if the tomato is, in fact, a fruit, a vegetable, or an extraordinary Argentinean cactus without thorns, but I do actually care about making a perfect Bolognese sauce for my dinner and a birthday cake for my friend, so I defer to experts – chefs – and add tomato to the former and not to the latterFootnote 16.

9 Laypeople’s Understanding of the Meaning of Specialist Terms

According to normative inferentialism, linguistic meaning is determined not by inferences themselves, but by the rules governing inferences (these are the rules telling us which inferences are permitted, prescribed, or proscribed). The role linguistic expression plays within the practice of speaking a language is analogous to the role chess pieces play within the practice of playing chess matches. Let’s get back to the role a pawn plays within the game of chess. The role is conferred to a certain object (e.g. a piece of wood or plastic) by the set of rules (R1–6). Now it seems that knowing how to use a pawn in a chess game comes down to knowing (explicitly or implicitly) all these rules. However, one can easily imagine that a person S does not know (R4), the en passant rule, and still plays chess matches. It is perhaps true of the significant number of amateur chess games that its players never perform en passant capture or are not even aware that rules of the game allow them to make a move of such a type. So, it seems that for an inferentialist, it is somehow natural to think of linguistic meaning as understood or known only to some degree (this idea is suggested in Brandom, 2007: 666–668 and Salis, 2015; it is nicely elaborated in Drobňák, 2022).

To play a game, one does not need to know all of the rules, just as one does not need to know all the rules determining the role a pawn plays within the game of chess. Additionally, one may want to consult the rulebooks of other games. The official rulebook of football is over 200 pagesFootnote 17; the rulebook of rugby is 170 pages longFootnote 18; and the rulebook of basketball is 95 pages long.Footnote 19 Hence, it seems it is a universal feature of games that they are complicated and constituted by numerous rules. It would be implausible to assume that participants in football, rugby, or basketball matches perfectly know all these rules. Since rules of the games determine roles that certain things play within the practice of playing matches, it seems that players can have partial knowledge of these roles, especially in the case of amateur games. Nevertheless, it is hard to claim that they do not play the game. So, there is nothing weird about partial knowledge of a role, and it does not preclude somebody from participating in a certain practice. (However, there is a difference between knowing a certain role only partially and not knowing it at all; drawing that line precisely might be tricky, but it is not our concern here. The aim of this paper is to show how inferentialism can account for the meaning of specialist terms. For that purpose, the explanation provided seems just fine.)

Things seem to be similar when we consider the meaning of specialist terms like “arthritis”. The whole (or almost the whole) set of rules determining meaning of such terms is known only to the relevant experts. Laypeople have very limited understanding of such terms; nevertheless, it does not entail the fact that they cannot use it meaningfully in everyday conversation. They are just similar to amateur chess players who do not know how to perform an en passant capture.

10 The Meaning of Specialist Terms and Laypeople’s Commitments and Entitlements

One may want to know how a speaker’s use of a specialist term incurs commitments and entitlements which align with experts’ meaning. To illustrate this point, when an ordinary speaker uses the term “chair”, they incur a set of commitments and entitlements to which they are held by their fellows, but which depends on them as a player considered in isolation. When a speaker uses a term such as “arthritis”, how are their commitments and entitlements, which depend on them as a player considered in isolation, align with those of an expert?

The core claim of this paper is that the meanings of expert vocabulary is determined by the inferential rules instituted by the use of the vocabulary by experts. Hence, if a non-expert asserts “x is a dog”, then they are is indeed thereby committed to “x has an alesphenoid canal” and many other inferences the experts are committed. One may think: “This is surely implausible, since it is a commitment layperson is incapable of recognizing!” But we can clearly have commitments we do not recognize. This is possible and this possibility shows up in the fact that uses by non-experts can be assessed in the light of the inferential norms instituted by experts. What really matters, is the fact that if one made an incorrect inference concerning some term pertaining to highly specialised discourse, then it would be appropriate for they peers to correct that inference (cf. Kaluziński, 2023b). Once again think of a football player during an official game. The player may be unaware of some rule of a game, but it does not matter. What matters is that if that players violates that rule, the referee would be justified in calling foul play.

11 Inferentialism is Particularly Well Positioned to Accommodate Burgean Anti-Individualism

Normative inferentialism identifies the meaning of linguistic expressions with the roles played by these expressions in three types of inferential transitions, and states that the roles are conferred on items by rules determining the correctness of inferential transitions. As noted, knowledge of the inferential role (thus, knowledge of meaning) is gradable in the inferentialist view. As Brandom observed,

if the conceptual content expressed by each sentence or word is understood as essentially consisting in its inferential relations (broadly construed) or articulated by its inferential relations (narrowly construed), then one must grasp many such contents in order to grasp any. (Brandom 2000: 29)

Thus, the meaning is understood in holistic terms and is determined by a significant number of inferential rules. The more inferential rules one knows, the better one understands the meanings of expressions. Laypeople understand the meaning of the term “arthritis” to a far lesser degree than do first-year students of medicine, who in turn understand the meaning to a lesser degree than do seasoned rheumatologists. Since only relevant experts regularly and knowingly use such specialist terms as “arthritis” in the game of giving and asking for reasons, it is natural for laypeople to defer to experts when the issue of the meaning of a specialist term is discussed. It seems that normative inferentialism is particularly well suited to accommodate two crucial points of widely regarded Burgean anti-individualism in content determination:

  1. (a)

    that the meaning of specialist terms is determined by relevant experts and that laypeople should defer to experts; and

  2. (b)

    that understanding of meaning of a specialist term is gradable.

Now suppose that one thinks of linguistic meaning in causal-historical terms. For example, the meaning of the term “gold” was ostensibly determined centuries ago. During the procedure of initial baptism it was decided that that thing will be called “gold”. Next, there is a chain of communication that extends from the people taking part in the initial baptism procedure to contemporary language speakers. According to the causal-historical picture of meaning content determination is not individualistic, so it may appear that it should be easy to accommodate Burgean points (a) and (b) in this view, but this is not a straightforward process. Since the meaning and reference of “gold” were fixed thousands of years ago, before such enterprises as science emerged, it is not clear why we should defer to experts such as chemists in our usage of “gold”. At first glance, in order to understand the meaning of “gold”, it is sufficient for us to have the intention of referring to an object of the same kind to which people who passed on the term “gold” to us referred. They did not need have been experts in any way. More importantly, there is no clear way of allowing the understanding of a term to be a matter of degree. Once again, all that matters is the initial baptism and the chain of communication: Either we have the reference preserving intention or we do not. Of course, this is a somewhat crude recapitulation of causal-historical theory, and I am not claiming that it is impossible for non-inferential theories of meaning to accommodate (a) and (b). Perhaps some minor adjustments to one aspect and some elaborations on another will allow even causal-historical theory to take (a) and (b) into account. What I am saying is that normative inferentialism can accommodate (a) and (b) easily and naturally, and that its ability to do so is not trivial and should not be taken for granted.

12 Conclusions

Thanks mainly to Burge and Putnam, it became clear that the role relevant experts play in determining linguistic meaning in many cases is crucial. Most notably, the meaning of scientific terms like “boson” or “sarcoidosis” seems to be determined by experts, not by laypeople. Normative inferentialism is an essentially social theory of meaning that claims that meaning-determining rules need to resonate thorough the linguistic community. Hence, it seems that accommodating Burgean insights pose a threat to normative inferentialism. However, in this article I demonstrate that extending normative inferentialism to highly specialised discourses is possible. Moreover, normative inferentialism, as understood in this paper, seems to be particularly well positioned to accommodate Burgean anti-individualism. One just needs to remember that normative inferentialism understands the notion of inference broadly and that it emphasises the role of inferential rules that need to resonate throughout the relevant community in order to be treated as meaning-constituting. It is just the case that for certain terms the relevant community is the community of experts and the route to that assumption naturally comes from the central point of inferentialism: the game of giving and asking for reasons.