Contribution
In Brandom’s conceptual-role semantics, grasping a concept means being committed to certain inferences. This follows from the inferentialist thesis that a term’s meaning is given by its justification through assertibility conditions, which Marabini, following Boghossian, calls the Meaning Entitlement Connection (MEC). The inferential commitments rest on a material notion of inference. Boghossian argued that Dummett’s and Brandom’s substantive conceptions of meaning cannot allow disagreement about pejorative concepts or extend knowledge in light of new evidence. Marabini replies that the argument overlooks a difference between Dummett’s monotonic and Brandom’s non-monotonic view of the norm underlying meaning.
Skim
Abstract, figures and selected sections, read when the work was seeded. Not enough to state its assumptions or results exactly; a Read note replaces this one.
- §1 (pp. 1–2) introduces MEC and Boghossian’s two charges against it, using “Boche”-like concepts (“Boche” = German, therefore cruel): MEC leaves no room for disagreement about such concepts, and it blocks the knowledge extension that new empirical information requires.
- §§2–5 (pp. 2–22) set out strong versus narrow and weak inferentialism, Prior’s “tonk” and Dummett’s harmony. They illustrate non-monotonic material inference with the match example (strike it and it lights, unless it is in a strong electromagnetic field, unless in a Faraday cage …) and discuss the Carnap conditional Boghossian borrows.
- §7 (pp. 24–26): Dummett’s harmony makes a new concept a conservative extension of old ones, whereas Brandom treats “Boche” as novel content, like the introduction of “temperature” in science, governed by ceteris paribus norms that allow disagreement.
- §8 (p. 26 on): to reject “Boche” is to decline the transition from its grounds of application to its consequences. The problem is not that the concept is novel but that we cannot be entitled to the commitments it carries.
Open questions
- It is a close reading in the Brandom–Boghossian–Dummett debate over pejoratives and inferentialist meaning, and it offers an inferentialist rival to the distributional account of meaning in LIT-208.
- Check whether “decline to endorse while using meaningfully” really answers Boghossian, or just relocates the disagreement to entitlement.
- The publication history is tangled: an Arabic-titled journal (2015), an edited volume (2018) and a PhilArchive posting (2016). Confirm which version the PDF is.