Bilateral Base-extension Semantics

Abstract Bilateralism is the position according to which assertion and rejection are conceptually independent speech acts. Logical bilateralism demands that systems of logic provide conditions for assertion and rejection that are not reducible to each other, which often leads to independent definitions of proof rules (for assertion) and dual proof rules, also called refutation rules (for rejection). Since it provides a critical account of what it means for something to be a proof or a refutation, bilateralism is often studied in the context of proof-theoretic semantics, an approach that aims to elucidate both the meaning of proofs (and refutations) and what kinds of semantics can be given if proofs (and refutations) are considered as basic semantic notions. The recent literature on bilateral proof-theoretic semantics has only dealt with the semantics of proofs and refutations, whereas we deal with semantics in terms of proofs and refutations. In this paper we present a bilateral version of base-extension semantics—one of the most widely studied proof-theoretic semantics—by allowing atomic bases to contain both atomic proof rules and atomic refutation rules. The semantics is shown to be sound and complete with respect to the bilateral bi-intuitionistic logic $$\varvec{\textsf{2Int}}$$ 2 Int . Structural similarities between atomic proofs and refutations also allow us to define duality notions for atomic rules, deductions and bases, which may then be used for the proof of bilateral semantic harmony results. Aside from enabling embeddings between different fragments of the language, bilateral semantic harmony is shown to be a restatement of the syntactic horizontal inversion principle, whose meaning-conferring character may now be interpreted as the requirement of preservation by inferences of harmony notions already present at the core of the semantics.