Abstract

In his Fixing Language (2018), Herman Cappelen claims that since revising and improving our concepts are important activities, being able to explain how conceptual revision is possible is a constraint on any theory in metasemantics. However, according to Cappelen, inferentialism is “static” and thus “not constructed to account for constant evolution and revision [of concepts].” He also claims that inferentialists have made little effort to address the problem of the limits of conceptual revision, namely, the problem of explaining how much revision is permissible and when we are no longer talking about the same topic through a conceptual revision. This talk aims to answer these objections to inferentialism. I will argue, following Sellars, that inferentialism can be so dynamic that it can explain how conceptual revision is possible.