ABSTRACT
I wholeheartedly agree with Macbeth’s most general point: there are many ways to develop the idea that inferential relations articulate a central and essential aspect of semantic content. Inferentialism is indeed a house of many mansions. In Articulating Reasons I introduce my own approach as motivated by three thinkers I call “the sage of Jena, the sage of Oxford, and the sage of Pittsburgh,” namely Frege, Dummett, and Sellars. I think that Sellars and the Frege of the Begriffsschrift are strong inferentialists. That is, in addition to the weaker claim I just offered as epitomizing semantic inferentialism, they also think that inferential role, sufficiently broadly construed, determines semantic content. For the artificial languages of logic and mathematics, with which he is principally concerned, Frege seems to endorse the still stronger view I call “hyperinferentialism”: the view that in these cases inferential role narrowly construed suffices to determine semantic content. So Macbeth’s compare-and-contrast exercise addresses figures at the heart of the retrospectively discerned tradition (expounded in further detail in Tales of the Mighty Dead) within which I situate my enterprise. In a real sense, my interest lies more in the inferentialist genus than in the particular species I develop. But it seems to me that the best way to promote the promise of such a constellation of ideas is to select from it a set of claims that can be argued to provide overlooked insights, and to assemble them into a whole that represents a progressive development both of the tradition from which they are drawn and of the current state of play in discussions of the topics they address. That is what I try to do in Making It Explicit. In her sophisticated and suggestive discussion, Macbeth identifies strands of thought in Sellars and in Frege that are not picked up in MIE, and argues that they are worthy of incorporating in such a contemporary synthesis.
