Interpersonal Sameness of Meaning for Inferential Role Semantics

Abstract

Inferential Role Semantics is often criticized for being incompatible with the platitude that words of different speakers can mean the same thing. While many assume that this platitude can be accommodated by understanding sameness of meaning in terms of similarity of meaning, no worked out proposal has ever been produced for Inferential Role Semantics. I rectify this important omission by giving a detailed structural account of meaning similarity in terms of graph theory. I go on to argue that this account has a number of attractive features, prominent among them that it makes sameness of meaning probabilistically determine co-reference.