ABSTRACT
It is a pleasure to read John MacFarlane’s sure-footed, sophisticated discussion of the relations between pragmatism about the relations between pragmatics and semantics, on the one hand, and semantic inferentialism, on the other. I certainly agree that one can be a pragmatist without being an inferentialist. I take it, for instance, that Wittgenstein thinks that the principal criterion of adequacy of semantic theories is the extent to which they codify proprieties of use, and so is a pragmatist in the relevant sense. His views about the myriad contingencies that influence the development of discursive practices, though, lead him to be skeptical about the utility of associating meanings of any sort with utterances – whether those meanings are construed representationally, inferentially, or in any other way. Quine is another pragmatist who is more than a little skeptical about semantics, but who is representationalist when he does indulge in it.
