Abstract

A modest theory of meaning does not attempt to give an account of the concepts expressed by the primitive expressions of a language. Throughout his career, John McDowell has argued that our semantic aspirations ought to be modest in this sense. By contrast, inferentialism, as developed by Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom, is clearly an immodest theory of meaning: it aims to account for the concepts expressed by linguistic expressions in terms of the inferential rules governing their use. In this paper, I defend inferentialism against all of McDowell’s criticisms, arguing that they either fail to apply to the view, or beg the question against it.