ABSTRACT
This chapter meshes with the inferentialist project as articulated preeminently by Brandom and Peregrin. Pure inferentialism aims to capture semantic content by attending to the inferential relations between sayings. The inferential potency of an assertion can, in turn, be seen to be a product of inferentially generated assertion conditions. So the focus of semantic theorizing shifts from inference toward assertion conditions. The interest in the chapter is whether these should be supplemented by denial conditions. Ian Rumfitt argues that an inferentialist account of the logical connectives ought to focus on the twin notions of assertion and denial. Retraction is a more suitable notion to focus on because it is, arguably, a primitive normative move that is, one inherent in any normative practice. Defeating conditions may impact on speakers at times distinct from the time of assertion. There seem to be many ways in which the same truth-condition might be constructed out of assertion- and defeating-conditions.
