Introduction

A common challenge facing the family of views that think of semantic content in terms of inferential role stems from their seeming failure to allow for the possibility of communication between conversational partners. The challenge is particularly strong for Brandom's version, since he openly endorses those features of inferentialism that are taken to lead to the problem, and he eschews most of the moves that have been suggested as ways of solving it.

Here is a preliminary statement of the problem, using only commitments explicitly undertaken by Brandom. On the one hand, understanding the claim of another involves “tracing out” the inferential significance of the claim made. As a result, a claim made by one may become available to be used by another as a premise in her own reasoning. On the other hand, the inferential significance of a claim depends on those auxiliary hypotheses that are available to serve as collateral premises. Different speakers will have different sets of collateral commitments. Therefore,

Together, these claims give rise to a problem of communication; participants in a linguistic practice cannot communicate with or understand each other, as they each associate a different inferential role with the sentences tokened.