More on Hegel as "inferentialist".

On February 4th in this blog I wrote about the three models of PhD education in philosophy, as per Brian Leiter.  I passed along Leiter's comment to the effect that one of the models, by working too hard to integrate substantive philosophical work with history-of-philosophy work, ends up doing strange things like positing an inferentialist Hegel. 

I noted that I didn't know what an "inferentialist" was or is. That is where we pick up today.

A friend wrote to me to say that I could ASK Leiter. I did so, and he replied with a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia's article on theories of meaning (philosophical semantics).

Theories of Meaning (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

It appears that there are three combatants in the field of the theory of philosophical semantics: the classical, the internalist, and the inferentialist. To be clear, these are not different theories of meaning. They are a level of abstraction up from that.  They are different theories about what a theory of meaning should be trying to do. The classical view is that a theory of meaning should assign truth conditions to sentences, I.e. we can specify something about a sentence's relation to things in the world.  Frege and Russell are both figures within classicism. Wittgenstein critiqued it. 

Internalist semantics, a view associated with Chomsky and Pietroski, denies the classical semantic assumption that a semantic theory should assign truth conditions to sentences. It says that meanings are instructions for how to build concepts of a special sort, representations of a certain kind. 

The inferentialist steps outside of the classical/internalist debate. An inferentialist begins with the distinction between good and bad inferences, and tries to explain the representational relations which the classical semanticist takes as (comparatively) basic.  This leads to a "meaning holism," I.e. the view that a sentence cannot be understood in isolation from the broader argument of which it is a part. 

I don't know how much of that, if any, I understand. But I gather that Leiter is saying that it is ridiculous to discuss Hegel as an inferentialist because inferentialism arose and has its meaning only within arguments of which early 19th century in Germany was still blissfully ignorant. 

Let It Be.