Inferentialism is a philosophical approach premised on the claim that an item of language (or thought) acquires meaning (or content) in virtue of being embedded in an intricate set of social practices normatively governed by inferential rules. Inferentialism found its paradigmatic formulation in Robert Brandom’s landmark book Making it Explicit, and over the last two decades it has established itself as one of the leading research programs in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of logic. While Brandom’s version of inferentialism has received wide attention in the philosophical literature, thinkers friendly to inferentialism have proposed and developed new lines of inquiry that merit wider recognition and critical appraisal. From Rules to Meaning brings together new essays that systematically develop, compare, assess and critically react to some of the most pertinent recent trends in inferentialism. The book’s four thematic sections seek to apply inferentialism to a number of core issues, including the nature of meaning and content, reconstructing semantics, rule-oriented models and explanations of social practices and inferentialism’s historical influence and dialogue with other philosophical traditions. With contributions from a number of distinguished philosophers—including Robert Brandom and Jaroslav Peregrin—this volume is a major contribution to the philosophical literature on the foundations of logic and language.

Philosophy is the search for the large patterns of the world and of the large patterns of experience, perceptual, theoretical, . . . , aesthetic, and practical - the patterns that, regardless of specific contents, characterize the main types of experience. In this book I carry out my search for the large patterns of practical experience: the experience of deliberation, of recognition of duties and their conflicts, of attempts to guide other person's conduct, of deciding to act, of influencing the physical world with one's doings, and the like. This is the experience that makes possible our social life, the formulation of plans for teamwork, the building of institutions, the development of nations, and the adoption of the ideal of morality. Here I develop a network of theories about the most fundamental aspects of practical thinking: what is thought in such thinking; what makes that thinking correct; what makes it practical; and the structure of the doings that accrue to the world when such thinking is effective. I have attempted to build each theory in sufficient detail, so that it il luminates its subject matter with a certain degree of fullness. But I have also aimed at producing an harmonious system of theories, so that the grand pattern of practical thinking can be admired, not only for the beauty of the separate structures of its parts, but also for its architectonic unity. Chapter 1 gives the details of the many facets of this project and discusses some methodological techniques.

The purpose of this essay is to both discuss commands as a species of speech act and to discuss commands within the broader framework of how they are used and reacted to.

Proceedings of the Winnipeg Conference on Human Action, held at Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, 9-11 May 1975

First published in 2000. In this volume are eight essays; with the first three essays deal with the problem of logical truth. Their aim is to elucidate what is meant by saying that logical truth is formal-dependent of form and independent of content-or that logical truth is tautologous. The next is on study of distributive normal forms that awakened my interest in modality. The next three essays are in the field of modal logic. Related to modal logic are the problems of the conditional (the if-then) and of entailment (logical consequence) on which the final essay is based.

The book contains a collection of chapters written by experts from the fields of philosophy, law, logic, computer science and artificial intelligence who pay tribute to Professor Risto Hilpinen's impressive work on the logic of induction, on deontic logic and epistemology, and on philosophy of science. In addition to an introduction by the editors, a section on Professor Hilpinen’s positions, professional services and honors, as well as a complete bibliography of his writings, the editors, McNamara, Jones and Brown, have compiled a multidisciplinary global cross-section of academic contemporaries that provides insights and perspectives on Hilpinen's influence and legacy. The essays reflect central aspects of Risto Hilpinen's research interests, and offer further contributions to some of the philosophical fields for which he is best known: applied modal logic, including deontic logic (from the ancient Greek δέον déon, pertaining to the concepts of duty and obligation), the semantics of normative language, the logic of action, and the theory of practical reasoning; the analysis of the concept of artifact; and the theory of semiotics in the tradition of Charles Peirce. The presence in the collection of several papers relating to deontic logic underlines Hilpinen's importance in that area, in which his publications have long been recognized as standard works. The book is an essential collection of ideas for all those who feel at home in a variety of formal disciplines, from propositional logic to the logic of artificial intelligence.