The view that the role of sentences in inference gives a more important key to their meaning than their ‘external’ relations to things in the world. The meaning of a sentence becomes its place in a network of inferences that it legitimates. Allied positions include functional role semantics, procedural semantics, or conceptual role semantics. The view bears some relation to the coherence theory of truth, and suffers from the same suspicion that it divorces meaning from any clear association with things in the world. However contemporary inferentialists usually allow an entry into the otherwise self-contained web of linguistic exchanges, through causal responsiveness to things and their properties, and an exit from it into practice and action. See Sellars, Brandom.