Word.ws English Dictionary

inferentialism

inferentialism noun: inferential role semantics: an approach to the theory of meaning that identifies the meaning of an expression with its (typically inferential) relationship to other expressions.

Noun

inferentialism (uncountable)

  1. Inferential role semantics: an approach to the theory of meaning that identifies the meaning of an expression with its (typically inferential) relationship to other expressions.
    • This crude inferentialism about recognition, of course, is not often explicitly defended: it is extremely implausible—just on plain phenomenological grounds—that recognition must be a matter of discursive reasoning.2008 January 8, Markos Valaris, “Two-dimensionalism and the epistemology of recognition”, in Philosophical Studies, volume 142, number 3, →DOI

Origin of inferentialism

From inferential + -ism.

Questions about inferentialism

What does inferentialism mean?
Inferentialism means inferential role semantics: an approach to the theory of meaning that identifies the meaning of an expression with its (typically inferential) relationship to other expressions.
What part of speech is inferentialism?
Inferentialism is a noun.

Words near inferentialism in the dictionary

  1. inferences
  2. inferencing
  3. inferent
  4. inferential
  5. inferential statistics
  6. inferentialism
  7. inferentialist
  8. inferentialists
  9. inferentiality
  10. inferentially
  11. inferiae

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: inferentialism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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