Abstract
I outline a discourse-based account of presuppositions that relies on insights from the writings of Peter Strawson, as well as on insights from more recent work by Robert Stalnaker and Barbara Abbott. One of the key elements of my account is the idea that presuppositions are “assertorically inert”, in the sense that they are background propositions, rather than being part of the “at issue” or asserted content. Strawson is often assumed to have defended the view that the falsity of a presupposition leads to catastrophe, in the sense that a false presupposition “wrecks the assertive enterprise”. I argue that the discourse-based account in terms of assertoric inertia can explain how cases of presupposition failure can sometimes be non-catastrophic; there are cases in which the assertive enterprise operates smoothly, despite presupposition failure. The chief problem facing this line of argument is to account for cases in which presupposition failure is catastrophic. If presuppositions are assertorically inert, then how can their falsity ever wreck the assertive enterprise? I offer a principled account that delineates the circumstances in which false presuppositions are, and those in which they are not, catastrophic.
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Notes
I will accept that certain linguistic constructions are presupposition triggers. However, I follow the lead of others and regard such triggers as being of two sorts, namely hard and soft triggers. The presuppositions associated with soft triggers can be “neutralized”, to use Abbott’s (2005) term. That is to say, in what Simons (2001) calls explicit ignorance contexts, the presuppositions go away.
It is interesting to ask whether definite NPs are hard or soft triggers. Grice (1989: 271) argued that existence presuppositions disappear in certain contexts. I have argued that Grice’s examples show that definite NPs are soft triggers. See Bezuidenhout (2010) for more details.
As characterized here, Strawson’s examples (3) and (4) seem very similar to the “loyalty examiner” examples discussed by Grice (1989). However, I treat Strawson’s examples as cases of non-catastrophic PF, whereas in Bezuidenhout (2010) Grice’s examples are treated as cases of presupposition neutralization.
Donnellan (1966: 284) contrasts the questions ‘Is de Gaulle the king of France?’ and ‘Is the king of France de Gaulle?’ One might argue along Strawsonian lines that only the former raises a legitimate question. In the latter case, the “interrogative enterprise” is wrecked.
Lambrecht’s (1994:17) distinction between narrow and broad focus readings is relevant here. When the whole sentence is used to give information about an antecedently identified center of interest, we in effect have a broad focus reading of the sentence. Such a broad focus reading would apply to (2) when uttered in context (5).
Stalnaker (1999: 39) notes: “Presuppositions, of course, need not be true. Where they turn out to be false, sometimes the whole point of the inquiry, deliberation, lecture, debate, command or promise is destroyed, but at other times it does not matter much at all…Normally, presuppositions are at least believed to be true…But in some cases, presuppositions may be things we are unsure about, or even propositions believed or known to be untrue”.
If there are already two books in the context that are equally salient and the speaker wants to say something about one rather than the other, the speaker will typically use a restrictive relative clause to pick out the desired book—e.g., ‘the book that was published by MIT Press’. However, this doesn’t mean that the information conveyed by a nonrestrictive relative clause cannot also on occasion play a similar focusing role.
von Fintel takes Strawson’s challenge to be to explain why, when presented out-of-the-blue with sentences such as (2), we feel “squeamish”, whereas we judge sentences such as (3) and (4) to be false. He takes these judgments of squeamishness and falsity, which he marks by attaching ‘#’ and ‘F’ respectively to the sentences in question, to be keyed to pragmatic rather than semantic factors. They are related to conversational strategies that we adopt when faced with PF. The falsity here is “pragmatic falsity”. Given the expressivist conception of presupposition adopted in this paper, it would be clearer to pose the issue as one of explaining why some sentences are and some are not assertible out-of-the-blue, instead of talking of squeamishness and pragmatic falsity.
I am not endorsing this truth-value-gap account, simply reporting on what Horn says.
Horn also uses this claim as a the basis for the more general claim that presuppositions don’t specify conditions that sentences must satisfy in order to be truth-evaluable, and that we must therefore give a pragmatic as opposed to a semantic account of presupposition.
I am also suggesting that the gap is not a truth-value gap. Rather, the gap in the case of an out-of-the blue utterance of (2) is that the context fails to provide enough information to allow the assertive enterprise to move forward. On the other hand, in the case of (10) we can focus on the chair and its obvious emptiness. This allows us to draw out one possible conversational thread from the speaker’s utterance.
It is not true that all discourse-based approaches to aboutness or topichood are question-based accounts. E.g., an alternative approach is offered by Centering Theory, which relies on notions such as salience rankings of entities. See Grosz et al. (1995).
Note that (14) is also absolutely about non-crows and non-black things.
It does not denote anything, but it may designate or refer to something, if the speaker’s referential intentions succeed.
If I am correct, then I need to take issue with Roberts (2005). She distinguishes the presuppositions associated with definite NPs, which she calls “anaphoric presuppositions”, from those associated with NRRs, which she calls “background presuppositions”.
This paper was first written in honor of Jay Atlas and presented at Jayfest, held at Pomona College in April 2005. I have presented refined versions in several other venues, most recently at the 3rd Context and Communication Workshop in Barcelona in September 2010. I thank all those who responded to various iterations of my paper for their excellent advice. Much has changed as a result of those interactions. I would especially like to thank Barbara Abbott and Craige Roberts, who read earlier drafts of this paper and provided detailed written comments.
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Bezuidenhout, A. Presupposition Failure and the Assertive Enterprise. Topoi 35, 23–35 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9265-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9265-4