Abstract
The perennial question - What is meaning? - receives many answers. In this paper I present and discuss inferentialism - a recent approach to semantics based on the thesis that to have (such and such) a meaning is to be governed by (such and such) a cluster of inferential rules.
I point out that this thesis presupposes that looking for meaning requires seeing language as a social institution (rather than, say, a psychological reality). I also indicate that this approach may be seen as a new embodiment of the old ideas of structuralism.