Between Inferentialism and Referentialism

This book explores the enduring opposition between two competing theories of meaning—referentialism and inferentialism—within the pragmatist tradition. It explores the historical and philosophical underpinnings of this debate, tracing its roots to Kant’s principle of togetherness, which emphasizes the interplay between concepts and intuitions as the foundation of cognition. The book offers a comprehensive reconstruction of inferentialism, examining its evolution from Carnap’s syntactic project to Sellars’s critique of the Given and Brandom’s normative pragmatics. The author argues that inferentialism, while innovative, ultimately fails to maintain the Kantian balance between language and the world. In contrast, he advances a pragmatist referentialism, drawing on Peirce’s semiotic innovations and François Recanati’s radical contextualism to propose a theory of meaning that integrates empirical and rational dimensions. By situating the inferentialist–referentialist divide within pragmatism and connecting it to broader developments in analytic philosophy, logic, and Kantian thought, Between Inferentialism and Referentialism reframes contemporary debates on semantics. It is an essential resource for scholars and students of pragmatism, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy.