Smugglers of reference: expressivist-inferentialism and the inevitability of model denotation

Khalifa, Millson and Risjord (2022) have proposed a “thoroughgoing” inferentialist account of scientific representation. They claim that their account overcomes what they call the “smuggling” objection, namely, the fact that inferentialist accounts always require implicitly to rely on some more fundamental relation between the model and the target, such as similarity, isomorphism, or denotation. These authors attempt to avoid the smuggling objection by exporting Brandom’s (1994) expressivist theory of reference in the philosophy of language to the case of scientific representation. In this paper, I set aside similarity and isomorphism, and focus on denotation. I take the so-called DEKI account of scientific representation (Frigg and Nguyen 2020), which assumes denotation as a crucial element of representation, as a point of reference to critically analyse Khalifa, Millson and Risjord’s proposal. I argue that the authors do not successfully address the smuggling objection, and that the account is also open to further objections. I conclude that denotation is a required element for a working account of scientific representation, and that thoroughgoing inferentialism remains unsatisfactory.)