“Pragmatic Inferentialism”

A, if not the, key motivation for turning to neopragmatic metasemantic theory is its promising strategy for circumventing the following orthodox representationalist’s dilemma: Shoehorn any seemingly non-representational and truth-apt term or interrelated vocabulary of terms ( be it modal, moral, mathematical, and so on) into a worldly-representational frame or accept an error theory about the term’s or vocabulary’s truth-apt status. As I shall explain below, neopragmatic theory holds that any proposition’s truth-aptitude is guaranteed by its playing the right kind of inferential role, irrespective of whether that role facilitates a worldly-representational function. A second reason for turning to neopragmatism is its promise as a general method of philosophical inquiry. To borrow Amie Thomasson’s turn of phrase, neopragmatism promises to “give the meaning” of a philosophically interesting term “by giving the rules of use that enable the term to fulfill its function.” Below, I argue that extant statements of neopragmatism lack the resources necessary for delivering on these two promises. The gist of this argument is that an item’s inferential role guarantees no more than a façade of truth-aptitude and concomitant hollow truths of arbitrary, inferential-role governed language games. This deficiency leaves the neopragmatist vulnerable to the representationalist dilemma, and it yields a feeble philosophical method that cannot discriminate between ersatz and genuine philosophical truths. In what follows, I propose a fortification of neopragmatic theory that would enable it to circumvent the representationalist dilemma and supply a philosophical method of giving the meaning of philosophical interesting terms by way of giving its function. I argue that the neopragmatist must replace the notion of a causal-regulative conception of a truth-apt item’s function that figures in a number of neopragmatic theorist’s discussions with the hermeneutic conception of function that I develop below. To this end, I argue that any seemingly truth-apt item, be it worldly-representational or not, earns its status as a genuine truth-apt item by dint of its hermeneutic function. As a proof of concept, I conclude with a brief sketch of this method’s framing of further inquiry into metaphysical modal and normative concepts.

Speakers

Stefan Sciaraffa, Associate Professor, McMaster University.