Abstract
An “inferentialist” semantic theory for some language L aims to account for the meanings of the sentences of L solely in terms of the inferential rules governing their use. A “hyper-inferentialist” theory admits into the semantics only “narrowly inferential” rules that normatively relate sentences of L to other sentences of L. A “strong inferentialist” theory also admits into the semantics “broadly inferential” rules that normatively relate perceptual states to sentences of L or sentences of L to intentional actions. It is widely thought that only the latter of these two sorts of semantic theories is at all viable. I argue here that the opposite is so. Negatively, strong inferentialism is viciously circular: including rules into the semantic theory that relate perceptual states to sentences of the language requires us to appeal, in individuating those perceptual states, to the very meanings for which we are supposed to be inferentially accounting. Hyper-inferentialism does not face this problem because it does not appeal to any nonlinguistic states. Positively, though hyper-inferentialism is widely thought to be a theoretical non-starter, I argue here that it is a genuine theoretical possibility insofar as it essentially includes cross-perspectival inferences, inferences along the lines of the one from sentences “The ball is in front of n,” “The ball is red,” and “The lighting is good” to sentence “n sees that the ball is red.” I make the further exegetical claim that Brandom (Making it explicit, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1994), though unanimously taken to be a strong inferentialist, is in fact a hyper-inferentialist.
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Notes
As Brandom principally uses the term, and as I will use it following this principal usage, an “inferentialist” semantic theory for some language L aims to account for the meaning of the sentences of that language in terms of the inferential rules governing their use and not, for instance, in terms of their representational adequacy conditions. According to this usage of the term, it is a minimal condition of a position’s being aptly called “inferentialism” that it is incompatible with “representationalism” in virtue of taking opposite order of explanation. Whereas a representationalist approach aims to account for the meaning of a sentence in terms of its representational adequacy conditions, understanding its inferential relations as derivative, an inferentialist approach to meaning aims to account for the meaning of a sentence in terms of its inferential relations, understanding its representational adequacy conditions as derivative.
I leave the term “claim” here ambiguous between, in Brandom’s vocabulary, “claimable” and “claiming.” Wanderer and Weiss speak of inferential relations obtaining between acts of claiming, but Brandom often speaks of inferential relations obtaining between claimables.
As far as I’m aware, the only place in which Brandom’s view is not misrepresented this way, is Wanderer’s book (2008, pp. 189–190). Wanderer is also the only person who, by my test specified below, does not take Brandom to be a strong inferentialist. It is therefore surprising to me that the view is characterized as it is in the quote above.
It is worth noting that the appeal to “language-entry” and “language-exit” rules, though the most common reason, is not the only reason why the term “inferentialism” is often taken to be a misreprepresentative label for Brandom’s semantic theory. As Lance (1997) also points out and MacFarlane (2010) elaborates, the basic rules that figure into Brandom’s semantic theory are rules for scorekeeping rather than rules for inferring. Whether or not one thinks that “inferentialism” is a misleading name for the semantic theory in virtue of this feature of it, the important point is that this is not the feature along which the “strong-” vs. “hyper-” distinction is drawn.
I am following Brandom (1994, pp. 234–235) and diverging from Sellars in speaking of language-entry and language-exit “moves” here. Sellars (1954, 1974) speaks of language-entry, language-language, and language-exit transitions, and he is clear that he only considers the middle category as a category of moves. The reason is that he regards a move as a transition from one position in the game to another position the game. He takes it, however, that transition from, say, having a red sensation to uttering “This is red,” though it terminates in one’s occupying a position in the game, does not start with a position in the game. This may seem to be a minor terminological difference between Brandom and Sellars, but I think it actually goes quite deep and in fact underlies much of the confusion diagnosed here. Sellars maintains that it is solely language-language moves that can be said to be rule-governed, and so it is only the rules governing such moves that account for what he speaks of as the “conceptual status” (1963d) of linguistic expressions. Nevertheless, he maintains that all three sorts of transitions play a role in determining (what he calls) an expression’s “meaning” (1963d, p. 316). O’Shea (2018, p. 320, n.8) puzzles over this distinction is Sellars Though there is not space to develop this exegetical claim here, I take it that this terminology is a bit misleading, and the distinction he is drawing here corresponds to the distinction I draw in Sect. 6 between “semantic” and “metasemantics.”
When I speak of commitment to a sentence here, this is shorthand for speaking of commitment to the claim that one mains in assertorically uttering that sentence.
I am following the simple suggestion of Wiess and Wanderer quoted above, but various other formulations of language-entry rules have been made. For a particularly developed account of language-entry rules, see Kukla and Lance (2009), in which they articulate language-entries in terms of special sorts of speech acts—“Lo!” acts, such as “Lo! A red ball!”—to which one comes to be entitled in virtue of first-personally recognizing such things as red balls. Though this account would be subject to the criticism in the following section in just the same way as the simple suggestion of Weiss and Wanderer, it’s worth noting that Kukla and Lance do not actually take themselves to be engaging in the inferentialist project of giving a semantic theory for sentences in terms of rules governing their use. Their explicitly stated project is just giving a pragmatics—an account of use—without the inferentialist ambition of accounting for meaning in terms of rules governing use. The distinction between semantics and epistemology articulated in Sect. 6 may make it possible to reconcile Kukla and Lance’s key claims with those put forward here, but this task is not undertaken here.
In the discussion that follows, I keep the “(broadly) inferential” implicit in talking of “rules.”
Though Sellars is widely taken to be the main proponent of strong inferentialism, I take it that he rejects strong inferentialism in virtue of recognizing this very problem with it. See especially Sellars (1953a, p. 133). Moreover, I take it that Sellars’s solution is the very same solution I will put forward shortly: Sellars is a hyper-inferentialist about conceptual content, maintaining that “the conceptual meaning of descriptive as well as logical symbols, is constituted, completely constituted, by syntactical rules” (p. 136).
There are other conditions that Dummett associates with “full-bloodedness” on which I wish to stay neutral on here. For instance, Dummett takes it that, if one has a full-blooded theory of meaning for some language, then learning that theory would suffice for an outsider to that language to acquire the concepts expressed by the expressions of that language. It’s not clear to me that giving a full-blooded account of conceptual contents, in the sense of giving an account of the concepts expressed by the primitive terms of the language, commits one to the claim that one can acquire a whole network of concepts “as from outside” through learning a semantic theory. Drawing such distinctions may be the way to respond to McDowell’s (1998a) influential criticism of Dummett, though a full intervention into this debate (which concerns the viability of inferentialism in general, not hyper-inferentialism in particular) is beyond the scope of the current paper.
Kremer says the following of concepts and intuitions, but he clearly implies that is also to be said of inference and representation.
It’s worth noting that, in Making It Explicit, Brandom explicitly acknowledges this alternative to inferentialism, saying “[O]ne might eschew reductive explanations in semantics entirely and remain contented with describing the relations among a family of mutually presupposing concepts-a family that includes representation, inference, claiming, referring, and so on” (669n90). Here too, Brandom brings this position up not to say that it’s wrong (Brandom doesn’t take himself to be entitled to that claim), but just to say that it’s incompatible with the inferentialist position advanced in the book.
Indeed, Kremer’s account can be seen as developing certain key thoughts in the work of McDowell, and I take it that Brandom has McDowell in mind in the quote in the above note.
See especially McDowell (2009a).
Since the rules discussed are simply inferential rules between sentences, they can be integrated into many existing inferentialist formal semantic frameworks. Of particular note is the sequent-based formal framework developed by the ROLE working group led by Brandom and Hlobil which straightforwardly permits the inclusion of defeasible rules of the sort proposed here. See Brandom (2018), Kaplan (2022), and Brandom and Hlobil (forthcoming). See also Simonelli (2022, Chap. 4) for a formal framework, drawing on that of Kukla et al. (2009), more capable of directly integrating normative pragmatic inferential rules of the sort spelled out here, and Simonelli (2022, Appendix) for a schema for translating between this framework and that of Brandom, Hlobil, and Kaplan. It should also be noted that these rules are proposed only as an example of the sort of rules that would figure into a hyper-inferentialist theory, and not as a serious proposal for the rules that the final semantic theory would actually have. It seems to me that language-entry moves are essentially tied to the use of demonstrative expressions. Even if a given move does not actually involve the use of any demonstrative expression it is essentially that, whenever one makes such a move, one is able to use a demonstrative expression, tokening a “This” that picks out an object to which one is non-inferentially applying a concept. One of the unfortunate features of Making It Explicit is that the account of perception, offered in Chap. 4, is offered in Chap. 4. That is, the account we get of these reliability inferences that underwrite non-inferential authority doesn’t incorporate the full semantic machinery developed in the second part of the book. As my main task here is a conceptual one, I leave the full technical development of the theory to future projects.
As Sellars (1956) says, “there is an important sense in which one has no concept pertaining to the observable properties of physical objects in Space and Time unless one has them all” (p. 275). One might doubt whether a claim quite that radical is correct, but one certainly needs more than the set of concepts pertaining to color and shapes to have any of the concepts of color or shape.
For such a formal framework, see Simonelli (2022, Chap. 4).
The metalanguage deployed here contains nothing but the vocabulary required to specify the scorekeeping consequences (the attribution of normative statuses towards claims) of taking a player as bearing certain normative statuses towards claims. Thus, the meta-language might be formally rendered in a signed-sequent notation of the sort that figures in bilateral logic (e.g. Francez 2014), with the signs expressing different normative statuses (see Simonelli 2022, pp. 91–106). This purely formal character of the meta-language can be seen as a definitive feature of a hyper-inferentialist theory.
In this way, the hyper-inferentialist strategy, though a “full-blooded” theory of meaning in Dummett’s (1993) sense in attempting to account for “the concepts expressed by [a language’s] primitive expressions,” deploys the exact opposite strategy to Dummett himself. Dummet’s strategy is influentially characterized (and then criticized) by McDowell (1998) as requiring that the words for which we aim to be semantically accounting are used “only in first intention—that is, never inside a content-specifying ‘that’ clause” (p. 91). By contrast, the hyper-inferentialist strategy pursued here requires that the words we accounted for be used never in first intention—that is, only inside a content-specifying “that” clause.
This, I take it, is the crucial advance of Brandom’s hyper-inferentialism over what I take to be Sellars’s version of hyper-inferentialism. For Sellars, the “inferential articulation” of perceptual knowledge involves a reliability inference (of some sort) on the part of the agent of perceptual knowledge (1956, \(\S \)36–37; 1963c, p. 88), rather than the attributor. Thus, though( Sellars clearly wants to maintain that perceptual knowings are non-inferential, we lose are clear grip on the sense in which it really is so that someone’s seeing something, in and of itself, suffices for their knowing. This inferential articulation of perceptual knowledge on the part of the agent leads McDowell (2016) to criticize Sellars’s conception of perceptual knowledge as putting “in doubt the very possibility of perceptual knowledge” (p. 105). As I’ll explain in the next section, it is precisely the multi-perspectival character of Brandom’s hyper-inferentialism that enables us to maintain a McDowellian conception of perceptual knowledge while nevertheless endorsing a hyper-inferentialist account of perceptual content.
The one exception in the literature of someone who has not dismissed hyper-inferentialism outright is Legg (2008, 2018). Legg argues that Peirce actually endorsed a form of hyper-inferentialism, aiming to account for the content of even sensory terms in entirely (narrowly) inferential terms. Legg doesn’t say, however, exactly which inferences are supposed to go into the inferential articulation of this content, and so, after reading Legg’s work, one is likely to still be left puzzling over how such a view could be made to work. I hope the present paper goes some way to resolving that puzzlement.
For more on the philosophical significance of this perspectival distinction, see Simonelli (2020).
Importantly, one need not be attributed entitlement a claim in order to be entitled to a claim. As I look about the room now, seeing the various things around me and the ways they are, I am entitled to all sorts of claims, but, since there is no one else in the room, entitlement to these claims is not being attributed to me by any other agent (nor am I attributing entitlement to myself as if I were another agent). Rather, I’m simply entitled to them in virtue of seeing how things are. Brandom’s (1995) own failure to register this distinction, I believe, is responsible his distortion of McDowell’s (1998a) position (which McDowell 2009c brings out) when he tries to integrate it into his own.
See Burgess and Sherman (2014) for a helpful discussion of this distinction and its applications in more mainstream semantic (and metasemantic) theories.
For a detailed spelling-out of just how it is that an inferentialist semantics can do this, see Simonelli (2022, Chap. 5).
Given the way that I have spelled out inferentialism here, this is very clearly the case, though some proponents of inferentialism have explicitly denied this (hence the confusion surrounding the application of this distinction here). For interesting discussion see Stanley (2006), comments 19 (Block) and 21 (Stanley).
It’s worth noting that not all languages necessarily have a term that is governed by suitably similar norms such that we can say the term expresses the property of being red. Some languages carve up the color spectrum differently (Winawer et al., 2007), and, accordingly, will be taken to confer different basic color properties on this account.
Now, if one is globally inferentialist (as one should be if one’s an inferentialist at all), one should think that the scientific properties appealed to in the metasemantic theory—things like reflectance properties and brain states—must also be accounted for inferentially, and the metasemantic story that explains the norms of the scientific language that confer those properties as contents will be quite different than the meta-semantic theory of ordinary language, belonging to general philosophy of science rather than standard philosophy of language.
It is this sort of concern, I take it, that leads Williamson (2009) to claim that, without including language-entries and language-exits in their semantic theory, an inferentialist “could not hope to explain how many words refer to extra-linguistic objects, or how language is used in interaction with the extra-linguistic environment.” It’s worth pointing out that no semantic theorist belonging to the representationalist paradigm—for instance, someone putting forward an extensionalist semantic theory of the sort sketched out in Heim and Kratzer’s (1998) textbook—is taken to be tasked with attempting to answer these questions in the context of their semantic theory either. These are widely agreed to be metasemantic questions.
As with the case of colors, you don’t need to agree with me about the metaphysics of shapes to appreciate the general philosophical point here.
Brandom (2019) develops this point under the label of “conceptual realism.” On this account, the Sun’s instantiating the property of being a ball is its being such that, given how it actually is, it’s necessarily round, can’t possibly be square, and so on, where, following Sellars (1953b) “The language of modalities is interpreted as a ‘transposed’ language of norms” (p. 332). This inferentialist account of what it is for the Sun to be a ball is perfectly compatible with saying that the Sun’s being a ball depends in no way on us since the Sun is how it is, modally speaking, completely independent of us.
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Acknowledgements
I’m thankful for comments from and discussions with Bob Brandom, Michael Kremer, Lawrence Dallman, Preston Stovall, Ulf Hlobil, Rea Golan, Shuhei Shimamura, and three anonymous referees for this journal.
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Simonelli, R. How to be a hyper-inferentialist. Synthese 202, 163 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04382-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04382-1