Horia Lixandru

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.

According to a prominent argument, logical pluralism arises due to the ambiguity – or other semantic features – of natural language expressions such as 'valid' or 'follows from'. In this paper, I show that this argument is unsuccessful. First, I argue that there is no compelling linguistic evidence for the claim that 'valid' and its cognates are ambiguous. As a result, logical pluralism cannot arise from the ambiguity of these expressions. Second, I point out that semantic considerations are generally ill-suited to yield an interesting version of pluralism. The upshot is that logical pluralists cannot appeal to the semantics of 'valid' and its cognates to argue for their view.