[1] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is considered an early proponent of what is now called inferentialism.
[3] In its current form, inferential role semantics originated in the work of Wilfrid Sellars.
Contemporary proponents of semantic inferentialism include Robert Brandom,[4][5] Gilbert Harman,[6] Paul Horwich, Ned Block,[7] and Luca Incurvati.
[8] Jerry Fodor coined the term "inferential role semantics" in order to criticise it as a holistic (i.e. essentially non-compositional) approach to the theory of meaning.
[10] The approach also bears a resemblance to accounts of proof-theoretic semantics in the semantics of logic, which associate meaning with the reasoning process.