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 wha...