ABSTRACT
On Peregrin's use theory, words have meaning not in virtue of their relationship to something but instead in virtue of their rule-governed roles in what, following Brandom, he thinks of as a game of giving and asking for reasons. The whole static framework of both foundationalism and coherentism is to be jettisoned, replaced by an account that is constitutively dynamic, one that is concerned not so much with the products of knowing as with the processes of knowing. Specific expressions that could represent steps in arguments distinguished themselves from other expressions and became what we now call sentences. Kant's dichotomy of inferentially articulated concepts and given objects in fact conflates two different distinctions, that of sense and meaning with the distinction between concepts and objects. Peregrin's inferentialism is deeply Kantian in assuming a fundamental opposition between inference and reference.
