ABSTRACT
Jaroslav Peregrin characterizes the basics of inferentialism as follows: the approach of inferentalism is quite radical: it requires us to dispense with the persistent intuition that words are symbols, and that they stand for their meanings or that they become meaningful by representing something. Peregrin says that the evidential basis provided by Quine's behaviorism is too meager to account for language that it is unworkable to conceive language as entirely consisting in dispositions to overt behavior, where this is limited to assent and dissent. Peregrin supposes Quine to be unable to provide norms in a substantive enough sense for the purposes of inferentialism. Quine's idea is that of the disposition to assent to the observation sentence if asked; Quine calls the method of identifying such dispositions the method of "prompted assent". Language promotes the individual's inductions by giving him access to his neighbor's observations and even to his neighbor's finished inductions.
