This paper advances an approach to presupposition rooted in the concept of commitment, a dialectical notion weaker than truth and belief. It investigates ancient medieval dialectical theories and develops the insights thereof for analyzing how presuppositions are evaluated and why a proposition is presupposed. In particular, at a pragmatic level, presuppositions are reconstructed as the conclusions of implicit arguments from presumptive reasoning, grounded on presumptions of different type and nature. A false (or rather unaccepted) presupposition can be thus (...) represented as the outcome of a conflict of presumptions – the ones used by the Speaker and the ones commonly accepted or backed by evidence. From an interpretative perspective, this defaulted presumptive reasoning can be explained by comparing the available presumptions and repaired by replacing the weaker and unacceptable ones. (shrink)

Within the relevant semantics and pragmatics literature the terms “presupposition” and “conventional implicature” are used in a variety of different, but frequently overlapping, ways. The overlaps are perhaps not surprising, given that the two categories of conveyed meaning share the property of remaining constant in the scope of other operators—the property usefully characterize as projectivity. One of my purposes in this paper will be to try to clarify these different usages. In addition to that we will explore two additional (...) properties which are shared by some of these projective contents—strong contextual felicity, and neutralizability. The idea is to try to explain all three properties by taking into account information packaging. (shrink)

Presupposition has been described in the literature as closely related to the listener’s knowledge and the speaker’s beliefs regarding the other’s mind. However, how is it possible to know or believe our interlocutor’s knowledge? The purpose of this paper is to find an answer to this question by showing the relationship between reasoning, presumption and language. Presupposition is analyzed as twofold reasoning process: on the one hand, the speaker by presupposing a proposition presumes that his interlocutor knows it; (...) on the other hand, the listener reconstructs the propositions taken for granted and assesses them against the shared presumptions. The possibility of reconstructing a presupposition is distinguished from its assessment, where the consistency of the presupposition with the shared or common ground is evaluated, and its reasonableness established. The analysis of presuppositions from an argumentative perspective provides an instrument for evaluating the reasonableness of a presupposition and understanding its dialogical effect. On this view, the dialogical force of a presupposition lies in its presumptive nature, which sets and shifts the burden of proving its unacceptability or unreasonableness. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it aims at providing an account of an indirect mechanism responsible for establishing one's power to issue biding directive acts; second, it is intended as a case for an externalist account of illocutionary interaction. The mechanism in question is akin to what David Lewis calls presupposition accommodation: a rule-governed process whereby the context of an utterance is adjusted to make the utterance acceptable; the main idea behind the proposed account is that (...) the indirect power-establishing mechanism involves the use of imperative sentences that function as presupposition triggers and as such can trigger off the accommodating change of the context of their utterance. According to the externalist account of illocutionary interaction, in turn, at least in some cases the illocutionary force of an act is determined by the audience's uptake rather than by what the speaker intends or believes; in particular, at least in some cases it is the speaker, not her audience, who is invited to accommodate the presupposition of her act. The paper has three parts. The first one defines a few terms — i.e., an “illocution”, a “biding act”, the “audience's uptake” and an “Austinian presupposition” — thereby setting the stage for the subsequent discussion. The second part formulates and discusses the main problem of the present paper: what is the source of the agent's power to perform binding directive acts? The third part offers an account of the indirect power-establishing mechanism and discusses its externalist implications. (shrink)

Lying is an important moral phenomenon that most people are affected by on a daily basis—be it in personal relationships, in political debates, or in the form of fake news. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about what actually constitutes a lie. According to the traditional definition of lying, a person lies if they explicitly express something they believe to be false. Consequently, it is often assumed that people cannot lie by more indirectly communicating believed‐false claims, for instance by merely conversationally (...) implicating them. In this paper, we subject this claim to an empirical test. In a preregistered study of 300 participants, we investigate how people judge cases of implicit deceptions that would usually be excluded by the traditional definition of lying (i.e., conversational implicatures, presuppositions, and nonverbal actions). Our results show that people do in fact consider it possible to lie by indirect means, suggesting that people have a broader concept of lying than is usually assumed. Moreover, our findings indicate that lie judgments are closely tied to the extent to which agents are perceived as having committed themselves to the believed‐false claims they have communicated. We discuss the implications of our results for the traditional definition of lying and propose a new commitment‐based definition of lying that can account for the findings of our experiment. (shrink)

Lullus' conception of man is expressed in his definition of man as "animal/ens homificans". It is based on the augustinian understnding of being and is articulated in his dctrine of correlatives, determinig triadically every substance, consisting of the ability of activity, the active and the activity. Thus evry substance is understood as a substantial relation. From the definition of man as "animal/ens homificans" it results that the man creates himself throuhg activity, vhich brings him closer to the abstract essence of (...) his species, namely in his striving at moral perfection. Thus he humanizes the whole universe, aiming at the the human unity and the unity with the universe. This interpersonal aspect is embodied in a modified definition of man as "animl homificans interpersonale propter animam rationalem suam". (shrink)

Critical response to Laura Westra's article "The Disvalue of 'Contingent Valuation' and the Problem of the 'Expectation Gap'" (Environmental Values Vol.9, No.2, pp.153-171).

We review four constraints we judge to be necessary to the high-fidelity apprehension and description of inner experience: cleaving to specific moments, cleaving to pristine inner experience, ….

Maximize Presupposition! is an economy condition that adjudicates between contextually equivalent competing structures. Building on data discovered by O. Percus, I will argue that the constraint is checked in the local contexts of embedded constituents. I will argue that this architecture leads to a general solution to the problem of antipresupposition projection, and also allows I. Heim’s ‘Novelty/Familiarity Condition’ to be eliminated as a constraint on operations of context change.

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-021-09562-7.

Exponents and critics of semantic presupposition have almost invariably based their discussion on the ('Standard') definition of presupposition implied by Frege and Strawson. In this study Noel Burton-Roberts argues convincingly against this definition, that leads it to a three-valued semantics. He presents a very simple semantic definition which is weaker, more general and leads to a semantics more easily interpreted as two-valued with gaps. The author shows that a wide range of intuitive facts that eluded the Standard definition (...) follow directly from this ('Revised') definition itself: facts about the presuppositions of compound sentences and modal sentences, about presuppositional conflict and about differences in the logical status of simple sentences suffering from presupposition failure. The book includes a detailed argument that an ambiguity of natural language negation, generally assumed to be necessary to the defence of semantic presupposition, is neither possible nor necessary in a presuppositional semantics. Noel Burton-Roberts has made an authoritative contribution to a debate which has involved philosophers and linguists for many years. His command of the issues, his clarity of exposition and his theoretical insight may well serve to change the boundaries of that debate. (shrink)

In this book, first published in 1975, Dr Kempson argues that previous work on presupposition - whether in philosophy or linguistics - has been mistakenly based on a conflation of two different disciplines: semantics, the study of the meanings assigned to the formal system which constitutes a language, and pragmatics, the study of the use of that system in communication. The first part of the book deals generally with the nature of semantics in linguistic theory and its formal representation (...) within a transformational grammar; Dr Kempson argues against incorporating the relation of presupposition within such a grammar. The second part provides a pragmatic account of the foundations of a theory of communication and its detailed application to the problems raised by presupposition. The book is intended for those studying both philosophy and linguistics and also for those sociolinguists and psychologists with a more general interest in the theory of communication. (shrink)

Some presuppositions are easier to cancel than others in embedded contexts. This contrast has been used as evidence for distinguishing two fundamentally different kinds of presuppositions, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. ‘Soft’ presuppositions are usually assumed to arise in a pragmatic way, while ‘hard’ presuppositions are thought to be genuine semantic presuppositions. This paper argues against such a distinction and proposes to derive the difference in cancellation from inherent differences in how presupposition triggers interact with the context: their focus sensitivity, anaphoricity, (...) and question–answer congruence properties. The paper also aims to derive the presuppositions of additive particles such as too, also, again, and of it-clefts. (shrink)

The current discussions of conceptual schemes and related topics are misguided; for they have been focused too much on the truth-conditional notions of meaning/concepts and translation/interpretation in Tarski's style. It is exactly due to such a Quinean interpretation of the notion of conceptual schemes that the very notion of conceptual schemes falls prey to Davidson's attack. We argue that what should concern us in the discussions of conceptual schemes and related issues, following the initiatives of I. Hacking, T. Kuhn, and (...) N. Rescher, is not the truth-values of assertions, but rather the truthvalue-status of the sentences used to make the assertions. This is because the genuine conceptual innovation between alternative theories/languages does not lie in differences in determining the truth-values of their sentences, but turns on whether these sentences have truth-values when considered within the context of a competing one. The core of conceptual relativism does not consist in the claim that different conceptual schemes may yield incommensurable truth claims, but rather that different conceptual schemes may yield incompatible truth-value-status and therefore lead to distinct perceptions of reality. Conceptual schemes are no longer seen as sentential languages consisting of a set of sentences accepted as true, but rather seen as metaphysical presuppositions of presuppositional languages.[ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]. (shrink)

Kaplan (1999) argued that a different dimension of expressive meaning (“use-conditional”, as opposed to truth-conditional) is required to characterize the meaning of pejoratives, including slurs and racial epithets. Elaborating on this, writers have argued that the expressive meaning of pejoratives and slurs is either a conventional implicature (Potts 2007) or a presupposition (Macià 2002 and 2014, Schlenker 2007, Cepollaro and Stojanovic 2016). We argue that an expressive presuppositional theory accounts well for the data, but that expressive presuppositions are not (...) just propositions to be added to a common ground. We hold that expressives, including pejoratives and slurs, make requirements on a contextual record governed by sui generis norms specific to affective attitudes and their expressions. (shrink)

Since linguists began extensive work on presupposition in the 1970's, a long and heterogeneous list has been compiled of expressions, expression types and constructions that give rise to presuppositions. In the current literature, the principal (but by no means sole) diagnostic for presupposition typically appealed to is the tendency of the particular element of meaning to project, i.e. to escape the scope of operators such as negation, the question operator, or modals. An important intuition also routinely appealed to (...) is that the element of meaning is in some sense backgrounded, or treated by the speaker as taken for granted. There seems little doubt that there are interesting and theoretically relevant distinctions to be made between different types of presuppositions within this heterogeneous set. But the study of these distinctions is of interest primarily in light of the intuition that the members of this set share some common feature: that there is some singular phenomenon of presupposition to be described and explained. This paper is concerned with what presuppositions have in common, and offers an alternative to the current standard view. On the view currently prevalent in the linguistic literature, presuppositions constitute constraints on the common ground, or on an interlocutor’s “take” on the common ground, at the point at which 1 the presupposing utterance is interpreted. I do not intend to offer here a detailed critique of this standard theory, but perhaps a few words of justification are in order. The motivation for seeking a new account comes in part from the same considerations cited by Abbott 2000, in her critique of the standard view. Abbott’s central point is that the driving idea behind the common ground view is that presuppositions are identified with “old” information, or information that the speaker is treating as “old.” This idea, while perhaps helpful as an initial approximation, rapidly runs up against the observation that it is normal and commonplace for.... (shrink)

The key to an adequate account of presupposition projection is to accommodate the fact that the presuppositions of a sentence cannot always be read off the sentence but can often be identified only on the basis of prior utterances in the conversation in which the sentence is uttered. In addition, an account of presupposition requires a three-valued semantics of assertibility and deniability in a context. Presuppositions can be explicated as sentences that belong to the conversation and the assertibility (...) of which ensures that the remaining assertibility and deniability conditions of the presupposition-bearing sentence are dual to one another. The prevailing approach to presuppositions, grounded in Heim’s context-change semantics, can be criticized both on philosophical grounds and for failing to accommodate the phenomena. (shrink)

According to one view of linguistic information, a speaker can convey contextually new information in one of two ways: by asserting the content as new information; or by presupposing the content as given information which would then have to be accommodated. This distinction predicts that it is conversationally more appropriate to assert implausible information rather than presuppose it. A second view rejects the assumption that presuppositions are accommodated; instead, presuppositions are assimilated into asserted content and both are correspondingly open to (...) challenge. Under this view, we should not expect to find a difference in conversational appropriateness between asserting implausible information and presupposing it. To distinguish between these two views of linguistic information, we performed two self-paced reading experiments with an on-line stops-making-sense judgment. The results of the two experiments—using the presupposition triggers the and too—show that accommodation is inappropriate relative to non-presuppositional controls when the presupposed information is implausible but not when it is plausible. These results provide support for the first view of linguistic information: the contrast in implausible contexts can only be explained if there is a presupposition-assertion distinction and accommodation is a mechanism dedicated to reasoning about presuppositions. (shrink)

In this paper I elaborate on previous criticisms of the influential Stalnakerian account of presuppositions, pointing out that the well-known practice of informative presupposition puts heavy strain on Stalnaker’s pragmatic characterization of the phenomenon of presupposition, in particular of the triggering of presuppositions. Stalnaker has replied to previous criticisms by relying on the well-taken point that we should take into account the time at which presupposition-requirements are to be computed. In defense of a different, ‘semantic’ account of (...) the phenomenon of presupposition, I argue that that point does not suffice to rescue the Stalnakerian proposal, and I portray Lewisian ‘accommodation’ as one way in which speakers adjust themselves to one another in the course of conversation. (shrink)

Recent semantic research has made increasing use of a principle, Maximize Presupposition, which requires that under certain circumstances the strongest possible presupposition be marked. This principle is generally taken to be irreducible to standard Gricean reasoning because the forms that are in competition have the same assertive content. We suggest, however, that Maximize Presupposition might be reducible to the theory of scalar implicatures. (i)First, we consider a special case: the speaker utters a sentence with a presupposition (...) p which is not initially taken for granted by the addressee, but the latter takes the speaker to be an authority on the matter. Signaling the presupposition provides new information to the addressee; but it also follows from the logic of presupposition qua common belief that the presupposition is thereby satisfied (Stalnaker, Ling Philos 25(5–6):701–721, 2002). (ii) Second, we generalize this solution to other cases. We assume that even when p is common belief, there is a very small chance that the addressee might forget it (‘Fallibility’); in such cases, marking a presupposition will turn out to generate new information by re-establishing part of the original context. We also adopt from Raj Singh (Nat Lang Semantics 19(2):149–168, 2011) the hypothesis that presupposition maximization is computed relative to local contexts—and we assume that these too are subject to Fallibility; this accounts for cases in which the information that justifies the presupposition is linguistically provided. (iii) Finally, we suggest that our assumptions have benefits in the domain of implicatures: they make it possible to reinterpret Magri’s ‘blind’ (i.e. context-insensitive) implicatures as context-sensitive implicatures which just happen to be misleading. (shrink)

We can trace the “evolutionary epic” (named by E. O. Wilson, 1978) back to earlier writers, beginning with Robert Chambers (1844). Its basic elements are: fixation on seeing human history as rooted in biology; an aspiration toward telling the whole history of humankind (in its essential features); and insistence on the overall coherence of the projected narrative. The claim to coherence depends on assuming either that the universe possesses an “embedded rationality,” or that it is guided by divine purpose. This (...) article proposes the term “idealism” to refer to these two assumptions taken together, for in practice they were closely linked. Nietzsche (1881) was perhaps the first thinker to point out the evolutionary epic's dependence on such an idealism, and he also pointed out that the assumptions of embedded rationality and of divine purpose are closely connected. Darwin's theory of descent with modification (1859) was sharply inconsistent with these assumptions: he was not an “idealist” in the sense indicated here, and not a proponent of the evolutionary epic. Proclaiming his “materialism,” Wilson (1978) failed to acknowledge that the epic depends on idealist assumptions; other adherents of the genre (M. Dowd, L. Rue) resurrect (knowingly or not) its theological roots. (shrink)

In his paper ‘Gesture Projection and Cosuppositions,’ Philippe Schlenker argues that co-verbal gestures convey not at-issue content by default and in particular, that they trigger conditional presuppositions. In this commentary, I take issue with both of these claims. Conditional presuppositions do not supply a systematic means for capturing the semantic contribution of a co-verbal gesture. Some gestures appear to contribute content inside of a negation when their associated speech content is likewise embedded; in other cases, co-verbal gestures arguably contribute unconditional (...) content to the global level. When this happens, we can infer what might look like a conditional presupposition, but this inference follows naturally from general principles already at work in purely verbal discourse and does not justify the claim that gesture content is contributed to a conditional presupposition. Problems exposed in the discussion of conditional presuppositions show that we are not yet in a position to make a general claim about the at-issue status of co-verbal gestures. (shrink)

The paper confronts the disagreement argument for relativism about matters of taste, defending a specific form of contextualism. It is first considered whether the disagreement data might manifest an inviariantist attitude speakers pre-reflectively have. Semantic and ontological enlightenment should then make the impressions of disagreement vanish, or at least leave them as lingering ineffectual Müller-Lyer-like illusions; but it is granted to relativists that this does not fully happen. López de Sa’s appeal to presuppositions of commonality and Sundell’s appeal to metalinguistic (...) disagreement are discussed, and it is argued that, although they help to clarify the issues, they do not fully explain why such impressions remain under enlightenment. To do it, the paper develops a suggestion that other writers have made, that the lingering impression of disagreement is a consequence of a practical conflict, appealing to dispositions to practical coordination that come together with presuppositions of commonality in axiological matters. (shrink)

Two cross-currents from the twentieth century have affected evangelical apologetics: apologetic methodology and Carl F. H. Henry. Henry was considered the dean of American evangelicalism, who shaped the movement by providing a rational and propositional apologetic. Henry also engaged the issues in the midst of a larger question of apologetic methodology, primarily, between presuppositionalists and evidentialists. This article continues to address the two cross-currents by offering a Henrecian evaluation of Michael Licona’s new historiographical approach to defending the resurrection. In particular, (...) the article attempts to evaluate Licona’s evidentialist approach through the lens of Henry’s presuppositional approach. (shrink)

Trata sobre los presupuestos metafísicos de aceptar la Biblia como Palabra de Dios. En particular, trata sobre la posibilidad de las intervenciones divinas, de los milagros y profecías. Responde al argumento de Hobbes por el determinismo, al principio de la clausura causal del mundo, a la crítica de Hume a la posibilidad de probar un milagro y a la negación de las profecías. This paper deals with the metaphysical presuppositions which underlie the acceptance of the Bible as the Word of (...) God. In particular, it deals with the possibility of divine interventions, miracles and prophecies. It answers to the Hobbesian argument for determinism, to the principle of the causal closure of the world, to Hume’s criticism of the possibility to prove miracles and to the negation of prophecies. (shrink)

Metaphysical presuppositions are important for guiding scientific practices and research. The success of twentieth-century biology, for instance, is largely attributable to presupposing that complex biological processes are reducible to elementary components. However, some biologists have challenged the sufficiency of reductionism for investigating complex biological phenomena and have proposed alternative presuppositions like organicism. In this article, contemporary cancer research is used as a case study to explore the importance of metaphysical presuppositions for guiding research. The predominant paradigm directing cancer research is (...) the somatic mutation theory, in which mutated genes are presumed to be ultimately responsible for explaining carcinogenesis. This reductionistic approach to cancer has been criticised recently, and an organistic approach has been proposed. The article concludes with a discussion of the reciprocal interaction of metaphysical presuppositions and scientific practices for investigating cancer's complex nature. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Enguehard (Natural Language Semantics 29(4):527–578, 2021 ), who observes that presuppositions project in the same way from coordinations of declaratives and coordinations of polar questions, but existing mechanisms of projection from declaratives (e.g. Schlenker in Theoretical Linguistics 34(3):157–212, 2008, Semantics and Pragmatics 2:1–78, 2009 ) fail to scale to questions. His solution involves specifying a trivalent inquisitive semantics for (coordinations of) questions that bakes the various asymmetries of presupposition projection into the lexical entry (...) of conjunction/disjunction. However, we argue that such a move faces both theoretical and empirical issues. Instead, we show that the data can be handled without moving to such an asymmetric inquisitive denotation, by adapting the novel pragmatic theory of _Limited Symmetry_ (Kalomoiros in Proceedings of the 52nd annual meeting of the North East linguistic society, GLSA, Amherst, 2022 ) to an inquisitive framework in a way that leaves the underlying semantics for conjunction symmetric and bivalent, while deriving the projection data. (shrink)

Up to age 5, children are known to experience difficulties in the derivation of implicitly conveyed content, sticking to literally true, even if underinformative, interpretation of sentences. The computation of implicated meanings is connected to the (apparent or manifest) violation of Gricean conversational maxims. We present a study that tests unmotivated violations of the maxims of Quantity, Relevance, and Manner and of the Maximize Presupposition principle, with a Truth Value Judgment task with three options of response. We tested pre-schoolers (...) and school-aged children, with adults as controls, to verify at which age these pragmatic rules are recognized and to see whether there is a difference among these tenets. We found an evolutionary trend and that, in all age groups, violations of the maxims of Quantity and of Relation are sanctioned to a higher degree compared to infringements of the Maim of Manner and of the Maximize Presupposition principle. We conjecture that this relates to the effects that the violation of a certain maxim or principle has on the goals of the exchange: listeners are less tolerant with statements that transmit inaccurate or incomplete information, while being more tolerant with those that still permit to understand what has happened. (shrink)

Thinking the origin in a radical way amounts to thinking the movement by which what does not proceed from something else - what does not have its origin elsewhere - comes to itself, has within itself precisely the ontological energy to detach itself from itself and to exist as origin. In its primordial sense, then, origin is self-origin: it is, becomes, and is known starting from itself. This self-presupposition of the origin constitutes the very advent of Being, its unmotivated (...) and permanent upsurge, which has to be thought in terms of creation. Human creation responds to this ontological genesis, to its indeterminacy and to its incompletion - and, consequently, to its temporality. At once individual and collective - that is, both psychical and social - human creation alone can give meaning to ontological genesis. (shrink)

Presuppositions are pragmatically considered as the conditions of the felicity of a speech act, or discourse move; however, the decision of setting the conditions of a move, which the hearer needs to accept in order to continue the dialogue, can be thought of as a speech act of a kind. The act of presupposing depends on specific conditions and in particular on the possibility of the hearer to reconstruct and accept the propositional content. These pragmatic conditions lead to epistemic considerations: (...) How can the speaker know that the hearer can reconstruct and accept a presupposition? A possible answer can be found in an argumentative approach grounded on the notion of presumptive reasoning. On this perspective, by presupposing the speaker advances a tentative conclusion about what the hearer may accept, hold, or know proceeding from factual, linguistic, and epistemic rules of presumption. (shrink)

This paper presents problems for Stalnaker’s common ground theory of presupposition. Stalnaker (Linguist and Philos 25:701–721, 2002) proposes a 2-stage process of utterance interpretation: presupposed content is added to the common ground prior to acceptance/rejection of the utterance as a whole. But this revision makes presupposition difficult to distinguish from assertion. A more fundamental problem is that the common ground theory rests on a faulty theory of assertion—that the essence of assertion is to present the content of an (...) utterance as new information. Many examples are presented of utterances which are felicitous but not informative in this way. (shrink)

Writers on presupposition, and on the ‘‘projection problem’’ of determining the presuppositions of compound sentences from their component clauses, traditionally assign presuppositions to each clause in isolation. I argue that many presuppositional elements are anaphoric to previous discourse or contextual elements. In compound sentences, these can be other clauses of the sentence. We thus need a theory of presuppositional anaphora, analogous to the corresponding pronominal theory.

Presuppositions and Appropriateness of Assertions In this paper I aim to compare and evaluate two theoretic approaches to pragmatic presuppositions: the Common Ground account and Propositional Context account. According to the Common Ground account proposed by Stalnaker, it is appropriate to assert a sentence p that requires a presupposition q only if q is mutually believed as accepted as true and taken for granted by the interlocutors. Otherwise, Gauker claims that the ground of propositions taken for granted coincides with (...) what he calls the objective propositional context, that is the set of objectively relevant propositional elements that speakers ought to share in order to evaluate the appropriateness of utterances so as to reach the goal of a conversation.The main purpose of my paper is to show that, according to the Propositional Context account, a theory of presupposition has to take into account a normative-objective notion of context. Secondly, I aim to develop a criticism of Gauker's point of view claiming that the Propositional Context account does not account for the number of ways in which a proposition can be taken for granted by the speakers depending on the context. Finally, I propose to integrate Gauker's account with a further condition for appropriateness of assertion which states that: in order to appropriately assert a sentence p that requires a presupposition q, speakers ought to recognize how they should justify q in a specific communicative context. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of Stalnaker''s work on presupposition (Stalnaker1973, 1974, 1979, 1999, 2002). The paper examines two definitions of speaker presupposition offered by Stalnaker – the familiar common ground view, and the earlier,less familiar, dispositional account – and how Stalnaker relates this notion to the linguistic phenomenon of presupposition. Special attention is paid to Stalnaker's view of accommodation. I argue that given Stalnaker's views, accommodation is not rightly seen as driven by the presuppositional requirements (...) of utterances, but only by the interests of speakers in eliminating perceived differences among presuppositions. I also consider the revisions which are needed either to the definition of speaker presupposition or to the definition of sentence presupposition in light of the possibility of informative presupposition. In the concluding section, I discuss the ways in which some recent accounts of context and speaker presupposition depart from their Stalnakerian foundations. (shrink)

In this volume, Geurts takes discourse representation theory (DRT), and turns it into a unified account of anaphora and presupposition, which he applies not only to the standard problem cases but also to the interpretation of modal expressions, attitude reports, and proper names. The resulting theory, for all its simplicity, is without doubt the most comprehensive of its kind to date. The central idea underlying Geurts' 'binding theory' of presupposition is that anaphora is just a special case of (...) presupposition projection. But this is only one of the ways in which the concept of presupposition is taken beyond its traditional limits. Geurts shows, furthermore, that presupposition projection is crucially involved in several phenomena that are not usually viewed in presuppositional terms, such as modal subordination, de re readings of attitude reports, and rigid designation. While making his case for DRT and the binding theory, Geurts also presents an incisive analysis of what is probably still the most influential account of presupposition, viz. the satisfaction theory, demonstrating that there are fundamental problems not only with this theory but with the very framework in which it is couched. (shrink)

In The Dynamics of Meaning , Gennaro Chierchia tackles central issues in dynamic semantics and extends the general framework. Chapter 1 introduces the notion of dynamic semantics and discusses in detail the phenomena that have been used to motivate it, such as "donkey" sentences and adverbs of quantification. The second chapter explores in greater depth the interpretation of indefinites and issues related to presuppositions of uniqueness and the "E-type strategy." In Chapter 3, Chierchia extends the dynamic approach to the domain (...) of syntactic theory, considering a range of empirical problems that includes backwards anaphora, reconstruction effects, and weak crossover. The final chapter develops the formal system of dynamic semantics to deal with central issues of definites and presupposition. Chierchia shows that an approach based on a principled enrichment of the mechanisms dealing with meaning is to be preferred on empirical grounds over approaches that depend on an enrichment of the syntactic apparatus. Dynamics of Meaning illustrates how seemingly abstract stances on the nature of meaning can have significant and far-reaching linguistic consequences, leading to the detection of new facts and influencing our understanding of the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface. (shrink)

In this chapter, I produce counterexamples to Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism (PEC), a view about the semantics of ‘knowledge’-ascriptions that I have argued for elsewhere. According to PEC, the semantic content of the predicate ‘know’ at a context C is partly determined by the speakers’ pragmatic presuppositions at C. The problem for the view that I shall be concerned with here arises from the fact that pragmatic presuppositions are sometimes known to be true by the speakers who make them: hence the (...) Problem of Known Presuppositions. After discussing several unsuccessful ways to solve the problem, I propose the addition of a new Lewisian rule of proper ignoring to the semantics of PEC--namely, the Rule of Evidence-Based Ignoring. If the proposed account succeeds, the Problem of Known Presuppositions has a straightforward solution within the framework of PEC. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on the fallacy known as Complex Question or Many Questions. After a brief introduction, in Sect. 2 I highlight its pragmatic dimension, and in Sect. 3 its dialectical dimension. In Sect. 4 I present two accounts of this fallacy developed in argumentation theory, Douglas Walton’s and the Pragma-Dialectics’, which have resources to capture both its pragmatic and its dialectical nature. However, these accounts are unsatisfactory for various reasons. In Sect. 5 I focus on the pragmatic (...) dimension of the fallacy and I suggest amendments to the accounts mentioned drawing on the study of the phenomenon of presupposition in theoretical pragmatics. I argue that the central notion in the definition of the fallacy is that of an informative presupposition. In Sect. 6 I focus on the dialectical dimension of the fallacy. This dimension needs to be explicitly acknowledged in the definition of the fallacy in order to distinguish it from a different, non-dialectical, fallacious argumentative move involving presuppositions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI offer a simple‐minded analysis of presupposition in which if a sentence has a presupposition, then both that sentence and its negation logically entail the presupposition; and in which sentence with failed presuppositions are neither true nor false. This account naturally generates an analysis of what it takes to disagree and what it takes to be at fault in a disagreement. A simple generalization gives rise to the possibility of disagreements in which no party is at fault, (...) as is required by leading theories on predicates of taste. (shrink)

All humans can interpret sentences of their native language quickly and without effort. Working from the perspective of generative grammar, the contributors investigate three mental mechanisms, widely assumed to underlie this ability: compositional semantics, implicature computation and presupposition computation. This volume brings together experts from semantics and pragmatics to bring forward the study of interconnections between these three mechanisms. The contributions develop new insights into important empirical phenomena; for example, approximation, free choice, accommodation, and exhaustivity effects.

Presuppositions are items of information triggered by certain words and constructions that exhibit ‘projection behaviour’, which is to say that, except in special cases, they will escape from any level of embedding. Presupposed information is given, or at least presented as such, and there are two main theories of what it means for presuppositions to be given. On one account, a presupposition must be entailed in the local context in which it is triggered; on the other, presuppositions require that (...) certain discourse entities be available in the context. On the latter account, but not on the former, anaphora is a special case of presupposition. It might be that both accounts are correct, though for different types of presupposition. (shrink)

This paper consists of two main parts and a coda. In the first part I present the ''binding theory'' of presupposition projection, which is the framework that I adopt in this paper (Section 1.1). I outline the main problems that arise in the interplay between presuppositions and anaphors on the one hand and attitude reports on the other (Section 1.2), and discuss Heim''s theory of presuppositions in attitude contexts (Section 1.3).In the second part of the paper I present my (...) own proposal. To begin with, I define an extension of DRT in which attitude reports can be represented (Sections 2.1–2.2). I then argue that the verb believe triggers a certain presupposition and that, given the binding theory, this presupposition determines the projection behaviour of the verb (Section 2.3). This analysis yields predictions which are incomplete in the sense that they do not fully account for speakers'' intuitions about presuppositions and anaphors in belief contexts. In Section 2.4 I suggest that this is as it should be because we may assume on independent grounds that there is a class of plausibility inferences which complement the predictions of the presupposition theory. Finally, the analysis is extended to the verb want (Section 2.5). (shrink)

According to relativism, these appearances of faultless disagreement are to be endorsed. According to moderate relativism, this can be done within the general Kaplan-Lewis-Stalnaker two-dimensional framework, in which the basic semantic notion is that of a sentence s being true at a context c at the index i: it may in effect be the case that s is true at c but false at c∗. According to indexical relativism, this is so in virtue of the content of sentence s at (...) c being different from that of s at c∗. (shrink)

This paper provides a new solution to the problem of moral permissions for the moral error theory. The problem is that the error theorist seems committed to the claim that all actions are morally permitted, as well as to the contradictory claim that no action is morally permitted. My solution understands the moral error theory as the view that folk moral discourse is systematically in error by virtue of suffering from semantic presupposition failure, which I show is consistent with (...) a Kratzerian semantics for deontic modals in natural language. Formally, the solution is to treat the ordering source parameter within Kratzer’s semantics as undefined in the case of folk moral discourse. The paper concludes with thoughts about the import of the solution proffered for the alleged independence of the moral error theory from normative ethics. (shrink)

This paper discusses two possible formal approaches to the semantic/pragmatic characterisation of a subclass of the modal particles. It may well be that the approaches can be applied to other particles or that they can be applied to certain intonational patterns (e.g. contrastive stress), to morphemes (past tense, agreement) or to words (pronouns), constructions (some uses of definite descriptions, clefts), but I will not try to to show that here. The first approach is based on the optimality theoretic reconstruction of (...) Blutner & J¨ ager (2000) of the theory of presupposition that has become fairly standard, the Heim (1983) and van der Sandt (1992) view of presuppositions as anaphora (see Zeevat (1992) for an introduction and comparison). The first half of the paper critically reviews my earlier views on the treatment of particles in this setting, the second part introduces a novel view, again based on optimality theory, which takes as a starting point the marking constraints that are a necessary ingredient of my earlier treatment. (shrink)