Inferential role semantics (also: conceptual role semantics, functional role semantics, procedural semantics) is an approach to the theory of meaning that identifies the meaning of an expression with its relationship to other expressions, typically its inferential relations with other expressions. Proponents include Robert Brandom, Gilbert Harman

Gilbert Harman

Gilbert Harman is a contemporary American philosopher, teaching at Princeton University, who has published widely in linguistics, semantics, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller...

, Paul Horwich

Paul Horwich

Paul Horwich is a British analytic philosopher at New York University, whose work includes writings on causality, the philosophy of language and Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Horwich earned his PhD from Cornell University; his thesis advisor was Richard Boyd...

, and Ned Block. Inferential role semantics originated in the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...

.

Inferential role semantics is sometimes contrasted to truth-conditional semantics

Truth-conditional semantics

Truth-conditional semantics is an approach to semantics of natural language that sees the meaning of assertions as being the same as, or reducible to, their truth conditions...

. Jerry Fodor

Jerry Fodor

Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...

 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.

The approach is related to accounts of proof-theoretic semantics

Proof-theoretic semantics

Proof-theoretic semantics is an approach to the semantics of logic that attempts to locate the meaning of propositions and logical connectives not in terms of interpretations, as in Tarskian approaches to semantics, but in the role that the proposition or logical connective plays within the system...

 in the semantics of logic which associate meaning with the reasoning process.