Inferentialism, Compositionality, and Anaphora

Abstract

Inferentialism faces two influential objections: (i) it is not compositional and (ii) there is a lack of fruitful application of inferentialism to problems in philosophy of language and formal semantics. In this paper, I defend inferentialism against both charges. In particular, I do so by focusing on a central problem in philosophy of language and formal semantics—the problem(s) of anaphora licensing. I show that, by developing a compositional version of inferentialism, inferentialism can give more satisfactory solutions to the problem(s) of anaphora licensing compared to rival truth‐conditional theories.