The goal of this paper is to present and defend an inferentialist account of the meaning of fictional names on the basis of Sellars-Brandom’s inferentialist semantics and a Brandomian anaphoric theory of reference. On this inferentialist account, the meaning of a fictional name is constituted by the relevant language norms which provide the correctness conditions for its use. In addition, the Brandomian anaphoric theory of reference allows us to understand reference in terms of anaphoric word-word relations, rather than substantial word-world relations. In this paper I argue that this inferentialist account has many important merits over its rival theories. One important merit is that it explains why we can use fictional names to make true statements, even if they lack bearers. As a consequence, this theory allows us to use fictional names without committing ourselves to an implausible ontology of fictional entities. Another important merit is that it provides a uniform semantic account of fictional names across different types of statements in which fictional names are involved.
In this paper we argue that inferentialist approach to meaning does not, by itself, show that meaning is normative in a prescriptive sense, and that the constitutive rules argument is especially troubling for this position. To show that, we present the proto-inferentialist theory developed by Ajdukiewicz and claim that despite the differences between his theory and contemporary inferentialism rules of language in both theories function more like classificatory devices than prescriptions. Inferentialists can respond by claiming that in their theory meaning is essentially social and hence normative, but we claim that then semantic normativity becomes derivative of social normativity. and V tomto příspěvku tvrdíme, že inferenční přístup k významu sám o sobě neumožňuje ukázat, že smysl je normativní v normativním smyslu a že argument pro konstitutivní pravidla je obzvláště znepokojující pro tuto pozici. Abychom ukázali, že předkládáme protoinferenciální teorii vyvinutou Ajdukiewiczem a tvrdíme, že navzdory rozdílům mezi jeho teorií a současným inferencionalismem pravidla jazyka v obou teoriích fungují spíše jako klasifikační přístroje než předpisy. Inferenciálové mohou reagovat tvrzením, že v jejich teorii je význam v podstatě společenský a tudíž normativní, ale tvrdíme, že tehdy se sémantická normativita stává derivátem sociální normativity.