Logic as Making Inference Explicit

Abstract

In the preceding two chapters we used ‘truth-theoretic’ means to delimit the landscape of logical operators on which we then attempted to map the regions accessible to various versions of inferentialism. This, however, was not to admit that inferential patterns are mere means of approximating ‘real’ semantics which is directly accessible by the truth-theoretic (or other model-theoretic) methods. According to inferentialism, the meaning of a logical constant is its inferential role; hence there is no access to this meaning more direct than via explicitating the inferential pattern that confers the role on it. The strategy of our last two chapters was adopted simply in order to show that however you define a logical operator, there should be some kind of inferential way to it (albeit, in some cases the way may be somewhat arduous).