Categorical approaches to inferentialist semantics

Abstract

There are remarkable similarities between applied category theory and inferentialist semantics in the philosophy of language: a focus on making pre-existing structure explicit, sensemaking without rigid foundations, characterizing content in terms of external structure rather than internal structure, emphasis on open systems, and putting syntax and semantics in the same playing field. I will present some formalizations of inferentialism (a generalization of Girard’s phase semantics) due to Hlobil and Brandom and show some progress towards understanding what is taking place, categorically.