Introduction

Brandom's inferentialist semantic theory has three levels, which together comprise what he terms the “ISA approach”. The first is the inferential level which invokes inferential relations among repeatable sentence types (such as the sentence type: “Mandela is a lawyer”). The second is the substitutional level, which invokes indirect inferential relations between subsentential repeatable expression types (such as the singular term type: “Mandela”). The third is the anaphoric level, which invokes indirect inferential relations between unrepeatable tokenings (such as the demonstrative tokening “that”) and repeatable expression types.

The basic level is the inferential one. At this level, the semantic content of repeatable sentence types is identified with the appropriate role they play in reasoning, their inferential role. The substitutional level shows how to extend this to allow subsentential repeatable expression-types to have an indirect inferential role. The anaphoric level, in turn, shows how to extend this further to allow unrepeatable tokenings to have a similarly indirect inferential role. This chapter explores the core semantic primitive at the inferential level, while Chapter 6 considers its extension to the other two levels of the ISA approach.

It is worth being somewhat more precise about the notion of a sentence type at the outset, so as to avoid complications later on. In our context, a sentence token is any linguistic expression whose freestanding utterance is typically taken to have the status of an assertion.