Abstract

Peter Strawson attacked Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions by arguing that utterances of sentences such as "The present king of France is bald" presuppose, instead of implying, that a present king of France exists. A sentence S presupposes a sentence P in the sense that S is neither true nor false unless P is true. Many proposed definitions of presupposition fail because they do not account for the numerous examples of what some writers characterize as presupposition. In other cases, the definitions lead to paradox and inconsistency. Some discussions are vitiated by use-mention problems. Most discussions make appeals to linguistic instuitions without any clear idea of how such instuitions are to be judged and how malleable they can be. The following books and articles are examined: Gerald Gazdar, Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and Logical Form; Jerrold Katz, Semantic Theory; George Lakoff, "Linguistics and Natural Logic;" Wilfrid Sellars, "On Presupposing," Peter Strawson, "On Referring" and Introduction to Logical Theory