Bringing Bilateralisms Together: A Unified Framework for Inferentialists

Bilateralism in proof-theoretic semantics, according to which rules are provided for both assertions and denials, has been central to the development of inferentialist theories of meaning over the past few decades. Bilateralists are split, however, as to what this position amounts to, with two different formal approaches to bilateralism corresponding to fundamentally different ways of thinking about the basic notion in terms of which an inferentialist theory is to be cast: normative incoherence or committive consequence. In this paper, I show how these two forms of bilateralism can be brought together in a single framework that has the virtues of both. The resulting framework is uniquely capable of serving as a proof-theoretic basis to carry out an inferentialist semantic theory.