2025 Wendy Huang Lectures
October 21, 2025
I will be giving the 2025 Wendy Huang Lectures at the invitation of the Taiwan Association for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, at National Taiwan University, in Taipei, from October 21 to 23. The third lecture will also be a keynote presentation at the Taiwan Philosophical Logic Colloquium. The three talks are:
- Inferentialism for Everyone Tuesday October 21 • (handout)
I aim to give an opinionated introduction to inferentialist semantics, giving an account about what is so distinctive about logic, insofar as logical notions have a grip on whatever can be said or thought. In doing this, I aim to clarify the connections between logic and semantics, the theory of meaning.
- Existence & Modality (Wednesday October 22) • (handout)
In the second lecture, I will show how the inferentialist semantics, introduced in Lecture 1, applies to issues of predication, quantification and modality, and thereby provides some distinctive insight into ‘possible worlds’ models for quantified modal logics.
- Foundations for Truth-Conditional Semantics (Thursday October 23) • (handout)
Finally, I show how we might relate inferentialist semantics to truth-conditional accounts of meaning for natural languages.
A draft of the text of all three lectures is available here.
