Inferentialism: State of Play

Abstract

We may say, and we often do say that what makes the difference between a word and a kind of sound that is not a word is that the former has meaning. Yet what does this mean? Thousands of books and articles have been written about the nature of meaning and I have no intention to survey them all here (needless to say this would not be a humanly accomplishable task). For our present purposes it suffices to note that despite the immense efforts that have been put into these investigations no general agreement about the nature of meaning has yet been reached.¹