Exploring Reasons, Rationality, and Rationalism

September 10–13, 2025 · University of Zürich, Switzerland

Overview

The international conference Exploring Reasons, Rationality, and Rationalism was held at the University of Zürich between the 10th and the 13th of September 2025. Ulf Hlobil’s and Robert Brandom’s new book Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons was a turning point for inferentialists and inferentialist logic. The conference explored its central insights, and how it may be applied within different disciplines, such as within linguistics, epistemology, natural language processing and law.

📎 RRR Conference Program (PDF)

Location & Format

📍 University of Zürich, Switzerland

Sponsored by:

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Speakers & Contributions

Below you can find the list of speakers as well as links to their contributions.

Conceptual Content in Reasons for Logic

Ulf Hlobil / Concordia University
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Hlobil develops a implication-space semantics that includes first-order quantification, while nevertheless preserving the inferentialist idea that meaning is constituted from inferences. The open structured inferentialism that he discusses accommodates non-monotonic and non-transitive ways of reasoning.

De dicto entitlement, de re entitlement, and entitlement-dissonance: An inferentialist reading to Jean Paul’s notion of Ridiculous and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

Marcello Ruta / Universität Bern
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Ruta argues that Brandom’s concept of entitlement ought to be subdivided into de dicto and de re entitlement. He argues that situations interpreted by Jean Paul through the concept of the ridiculous (das Lächerliche) can be understood through the difference between de dicto and de re entitlement, in which one may experience entitlement-dissonance. Furthermore, Ruta claims that we can understand entitlement-dissonance to drive the progression of concsciousness within Hegel’s Phenomenology.

The Social Articulation of Content: Why Social Externalists Should be Inferentialists and Vice Versa

Shuhei Shimamura / Hiroshima University
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Shimamura adresses the worry by Fodor and Lepore that inferentialism makes meaning unstable. In this regard, Shimamura argues that social externalism, as formulated by Tyler Burge, adresses the problems, and can separate subjunctively robustly correct inferences from incorrect ones. That is, in response to Fodor and Lepore, material inferences are conceived of as being socially articulated through the linguistic community.

Three Kinds of Logical Expressivism

Luca Incurvati / University of Amsterdam
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Incurvati distinguishes between three forms of logical expressivism: attitude expressivism, content expressivism and inferential expressivism. He argues that inferential expressivism represents the best of both worlds by claiming that logical vocabulary serves the function of making explicit commitments to expressions of attitudes.

Inferentialism and Modesty

Rea Golan / Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
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Hlobil and Brandom do not take a stand on whether a semantics-first or a pragmatics-first order of explanation is to prefer. And while there has been much criticism of a semantics-first approach, there has not been the same level of criticism directed towards a pragmatics-first approach. However, in his presentation, Golan argues that a pragmatic-first explanation is insufficient, and that it is not possible to reduce linguistic content to linguistic behavior governed by norms.

Epistemological Normativism and the Expressive Limits of Inferential Logic: Between Sellars and Brandom

Omar Mahmutović / University of Sarajevo
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Mahmutović investigates the tension between the normative status of reasons and how they are articulated within an inferentalist space of meaning. Brandom emphasises mastering a base vocabulary, which can make inferential roles in other vocabularies explicit, but this raises a question of whether positing a universal expressive vocabulary risks reintroducing a sense of epistemic “givenness”, as it is found within the works of Wilfrid Sellars. In this regard, Mahmutović argues for an open inferentialism in which no one vocabulary is granted a privileged status.

A Tune Beyond Us, Yet Ourselves: Reasons and Conceptual Realism

Robert Brandom / University of Pittsburgh
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In his presentation, Brandom outlines a particular version of what he terms conceptual realism, which understands conceptual form through both what is represented as well as through the representings in virtue of their common content. He contextualizes his position within a broad historical trajectory, drawing key insights from early modern philosophy and all the way up to contemporary philosophy.

Damiano Canale / Università Bocconi
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Canale examines how Brandomian inferentialism may be applied to understand practical, and more specifically legal, reasoning. Inferentialism is fundamentally pluralist in its approach, and that may be useful in mapping the different dimensions of practical reasoning. At the same time, Canale emphasises that, as opposed to Brandomian inferentialism, legal reasoning is also determined institutionally, and therefore cannot serve as a general model for the determination of content.

Thomas Bustamente / Federal University of Minais Gerais
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Bustamente asks the question of what Brandom’s understanding of Hegelian rationality, which rejects both treating norms as prior to practice and grounding legal authority in participants’ attitudes, can offer to legal studies. Bustamente suggests that most theories of legal authority fail because they try to make sense of legal concepts through an account of legal authority without recognizing the suitable contemplation of others, and proposes that Brandom’s Hegel remedies this problem through a social holism, being a third position that is neither natural law jurisprudence nor legal positivism. Finally, he argues that Ronald Dworkin’s jurisprudence is compatible with such a model of legal authority.

Emmanuel Voyiakis / LSE
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Voyiakis discusses the problem of incomparable values in legal adjudication, as a judge making legal decisions on the basis of values that do not compare to one another is difficult at best, and impossible at worst. He claims that earlier accounts of thi problem, by Philip Sales and Frederick Wilmot-Smith, leads to the a problem of individuation, as they assume ordering incomparable values is the only solution. Voyiakis instead suggests that the right question to ask is whether any of the values are sufficiently strong to object against the reasons a judge used to reach their decision.

Ascriptivism and Inferentialism: Bridge between Epistemology and Law

Karlo Gadavski / University of Zagreb
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Gadavski argues that H. L. A. Hart’s work may be read as bridging law, semantics and epistemology. He claims that Michael William’s intepretation of Hart, and more specifically William’s concept of the “Accredited Subject”, may be a conceptual bridge in this regard. Furthermore, by introducing Brandom’s idea of a deontic meta-vocabulary, Gadavski proposes a unified theory of how normative statuses are conferred.

Peter Hongler / University of St. Gallen
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Hongler presents a more robust form of legal interpretation through the tool that is implication space semantics. Framing intepretation as illuminating a space of premises and conclusions, it both describes what lawyers do, as well as what they ought to do. Furthermore, Hongler emphasises that LLMs may contribute to the process of mapping such spaces, fundamentally changing how lawyers work.

Inferentialism, Intersubjective Legal Reasoning and Objectivity in Determining the Content of Legal Norms

Pedro Caballero Elbersci / Universidad Iberoamericana
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Elbersci proposes a new notion of legal norms, drawing on the meta-theoretical level from a deflationist meta-ontology, neo-pragmatism, a socio-normativist pragmatics and an inferentialist semantics. With such a notion, Elbersci claims that we are left with a beneficial explanatory consequence regarding objectively identifying the meaning of legal norms.

Strategizing with an LLM: How Large Language Models Influence Logic in Business Discussions

Patrick Zbinden / University of St. Gallen
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Most research on LLM’s reasoning capabilities focus on written, rather than spoken, interactions between humans and LLMs. Therefore, Zbinden investigates how LLMs may influence the logic of business decisions, and through an experiement, it is shown that there are significant differences between humans talking with other humans, ChatGPT-4o on the phone and ChatGPT-4o operating through a robot about strategic options. The results indicate that decisions made by humans talking with ChatGPT-4o on the phone are more logical than decisions made by humans discussing with other humans.

What makes a material inference valid?

Jaakko Reinikainen / Tampere University
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According to Brandomian inferentialism, implicit norms ultimately determine conceptual contents. In his presentation, Reinikainen attempts to formulate the argument Brandom uses to support this idea, terming it the “Always Already”-argument, as well as show how this argument does not defeat a sceptical position in relation to norms.

Sapience without Sentience: An Inferentialist Approach to LLMs

Ryan Simonelli / Wuhan University
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It is believed by many that LLMs are incapable of having concepts. Simonelli argues that, on the basis of global strong inferentialism, training on nothing but linguistic data is sufficient to master drawing inferences, and as such that LLMs should be ascribed the ability to have concepts. LLMs are therefore taken to be non-sentient sapient beings.

Virtual Double Categories: a Formal Model of Open Reason Relations for Neurosymbolic AI.

Kristopher Brown / Topos Institute
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Category theory has many parallells with inferentialist philosophy. But while categorical logic has been remarkably successful in understanding the structural relationships of logic, it takes the arrow of a category to play the role of judgments, and as such is restricted to merely transitive forms of consequence. Therefore, Brown suggests that taking virtual double categories as generalizations of categories which allows composition to be a property, may be of use to defining an implication frame.

Inferentialism After the Inversion: Intelligence, Containment, and the Collapse of Representation

Mihai Avrigeanu / Concordia University
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Avrigeanu takes inferentialism to assume that language precedes intelligibility, and argues that inferentialism defines intelligence post-hoc, instead of recognizing it as an emergent motion. He suggest repositing inferentialism, so as to reflect the collapse between being and saying. Drawing from a Spinozist system of metaphysics, he takes inferences to be what remains after language forgets that it was not the origin.

Beyond the Imitation Game: The Failure of LLMs to Participate in the Social Practice of Giving and Asking for Reasons

Bahareh Izadi / Concordia University
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Izadi argues that LLMs are unable to participate in the game of giving and asking for reasons. Her reasoning for this is that participating in the game of giving and asking for reasons requires being able to recognize others as authorities holding one to account, being able to undertake commitments and having a normative standing within the lingustic community. As LLMs are unable to do any of these three, they cannot be considered participants in the game of giving and asking for reasons.

Why Software, Including LLMs, Might Not Be Able to Engage in Norm-Governed Practices, Such As Speaking

Reto Gubelmann / University of Zurich
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Gubelmann argues that participating in norm-governed practices requires a teleological double structure - the ability to set, and sometimes violate, one’s own goals. Crediting software, including LLMs, with this ability presupposes a dualism, but even if we were to accept this, the mental side of said dualism seems unable to have goals. Therefore, software might not be able to engage in norm-governed practices.

Do LLMs reason (circa 2025)?

André Freitas / University of Manchester
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Freitas asks the question of whether LLMs reason or not. He argues that while LLMs are not yet formal reasoners, they are quite decent when it comes to material inferences, even though he takes it that such a notion of material inference needs to be better qualified.

Nature and Artificial Intelligence

Ulf Hlobil / Concordia University
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Hlobil argues that while AI may be of help when it comes to formalize arguments, AI systems cannot genuinely follow norms unless their nature sets a standard of well-being for them. He argues for his position by relying on the notion of AI not being subject to punishment, and through a reinterpretation of Kripkenstein’s paradox.

Organisers

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University of Zürich

Rämistr. 69, CH-8001 Zürich, Switzerland

Email: matsvestues.almlid@uzh.ch

© 2025 University of Zürich · Exploring Reasons, Rationality, and Rationalism