This is the first of three sessions, on inferentialist semantics. Greg will be in Taiwan delivering the 2025 Wendy Huang Lectures, and these three sessions in the M&L seminar are his opportunity to give the lectures a preliminary outing.
I have three aims for this set of lectures. Two are central, and the third is incidental:
- To give an account of what is so distinctive about logic, insofar as logical notions have a grip on whatever can be said or thought.
- To clarify the connections between logic and semantics, the theory of meaning.
- The product of these two aims is that I get to provide a philosophical prolegomena and a non-technical introduction to the more technical work I have done in my forthcoming manuscript Proof, Rules and Meaning.
Today’s topic is the fundamentals of proof, rules and meaning. I aim to give an opinionated introduction to inferentialist semantics.
