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Models and Rules in Semantics: Representationalism vs. Inferentialism| old_uid | 6929 |
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| title | Models and Rules in Semantics: Representationalism vs. Inferentialism |
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| start_date | 2009/05/14 |
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| schedule | 14h30-17h30 |
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| online | no |
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| summary | I shall sketch two competing approaches to logical theory and semantics. The broader view to which those approaches are subordinated is the place and role of meaning within natural world.
Roughly speaking, by a representational semantics I mean a model-theoretic semantics. The main concept of the interpretation of a language within this type of semantics is the concept of model. Word meanings and sentence meanings are taken care of, for instance in the Davidsonian way, through the inductive apparatus of the definition of denotation and truth in an interpretation for the syntatic well-formed sequences of symbols of the language to which those symbols belong.
By an inferentialist semantics I mean, rougly, a rule-based semantic system. Historically, the idea that the meanings of various logical concepts are to be rendered via rules for introducing those terms into and respectively for eliminating those terms from the discourse is associated with the work of the German mathematician and logician Gerhard Gentzen.
Genzen’s sucessful project was to devise rule-based systems of deduction. For each and every logical constant in the language of the system one should come up with a pair of rules, one which allows us to introduce the constant and a companion rule which shows how we can eliminate the constant. It is the rules themselves which give the logical meanings of those logical words, and not the models or linguistic representations we might associate in the vernacular with those logical constants.
A first challenge for this proposal is this: how to generalize this inferentialist thought from mere logical constants to whole areas of natural discourse through which it is obvious that we make descriptive noninferential reports? The work of M. Dummett and more recently of R. Brandon opens wide new horizons upon the connections and the order of explanation between representations and rules or, if we prefer the other set of terms, between model-theoretic and proof-theoretic categories. |
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| responsibles | Roy |
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