Inferential Magnetism

Recent years have seen the resurgence of the inferentialist approach to metasemantics (Chalmers, 2021a; Peregrin, 2014, 2024). However, there remain worries as to whether inferentialism can give us an account of language that would be ‘in good standing’. One worry concerns the risk of a kind of conceptual parochialism: inferential rules seem to float free of the fundamental structure of the world. This would make natural language unsuitable for serious metaphysical inquiry. My aim in this paper is to show that this worry can be resolved by the inferentialist. In particular, I show that normative inferentialism predicts a version of reference magnetism, namely ‘co-magnetism’ (Williams, 2020).