Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is considered an early proponent of what is now called inferentialism. He believed that the ground for the axioms and the foundation for the validity of the inferences are the right consequences and that the axioms do not explain the consequence.
Gilbert Harman,
Paul Horwich,
Ned Block, and
Luca Incurvati.
Jerry Fodor coined the term "inferential role semantics" in order to criticise it as a holistic (i.e. essentially non-compositional) approach to the theory of meaning. Inferential role semantics is sometimes contrasted to
truth-conditional semantics. Semantic inferentialism is related to
logical expressivism and
semantic anti-realism. The approach also bears a resemblance to accounts of
proof-theoretic semantics in the
semantics of logic, which associate meaning with the reasoning process. ==References==