Philosophical Topics

Volume 50, Issue 1, Spring 2022

Inferentialism on Naturalized Grounds

Tracking the World Down
How Inferentialism Accounts for Objective Truth

The background of this paper is what I call “pragmatic inferentialism,” a view that I attribute to Robert Brandom. Here, I develop Brandom’s view and argue (i) that it is a kind of subject naturalism, in Price’s sense, and (ii) that the charge of idealism sometimes addressed against it is unwarranted. Regarding (i), I show that pragmatic inferentialism finds support from evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology. Regarding (ii), I present what I call “level 0 expressivism,” which I take to be the semantic counterpart of some aspects of evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology. Besides, I resort to Brandom’s defense of Hegel’s conceptual realism. The conclusion of the paper is a vindication of objective truth in the inferentialist framework.