Abstract
The goal of this paper is to explore the presuppositionality of factive verbs, with special emphasis on the verbs know and regret. The hypothesis put forward here is that the factivity related to know and the factivity related to regret are two different phenomena, as the former is a semantic implication (an entailment) that is licensed by the conventional meaning of know, while the latter is a purely pragmatic phenomenon that arises conversationally. More specifically, it is argued that know is factive in the sense that it both entails and (pragmatically) presupposes p, while regret is factive in the sense that it only (pragmatically) presupposes p. In a recent article, Hazlett (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 80(3), 497–522, 2010) shows with authentic examples how know is used non-factively in ordinary language, and he observes in these examples, as he says, “a threat to Factivity.” I argue that non-factive uses of factive verbs, such as know and regret, far from being a threat to factivity, show that, on the one hand, know is ambiguous between a factive and a non-factive sense; on the other hand, in the case of regret, the presupposition of factivity has to be intended as a merely pragmatic implication which can be suspended by the speaker herself.
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Notes
See Chierchia and McDonnell-Ginet (1990, p. 281 ff.): “What the S family essentially tests for is backgroundedness of implications: it marks out implications that are attached to S not only when it is asserted but also when it is denied, questioned, or offered as a hypothetical assumption. Typically, if S implies that p is in the background, then someone who responds to an assertion of S with ‘I don’t think so’ or ‘Well, I wonder’ or ‘Perhaps’ does not thereby weaken or threaten the implication that p. […] The hallmark of a presupposition is that it is taken for granted in the sense that its assumed truth is a precondition for felicitous utterance of the sentence and places a kind of constraint on discourse contexts that admit the sentence for interpretation. […] Failing the S family test is excellent evidence that an implied proposition is not presupposed but asserted.”
See Williamson (2002, p. 34).
Cf. Hintikka 1962: Kp → p (for all p, where p is a that clause).
In a contrary sense, Gazdar (1979a, followed by Abrusán 2011, p. 514) argued against Klein’s hypothesis that emotive factives such as regret do not entail the proposition expressed by their complement (Klein 1975: B12; see sentences (6) and (7)). His argument is given as follows: “What seems to be happening in such sentences is that the verb of propositional attitude in the subordinate clause delimits a restricted set of worlds (not including the actual world), and it is only with respect to this set of worlds that the verb of propositional attitude in the matrix sentence gets evaluated” (Gazdar 1979a, p. 122). In other words, Gazdar seems to suggest that the propositional attitude of regret, expressed by the matrix verb, is under the scope of the propositional attitude of belief, expressed by the subordinate clause. As Gazdar (ibid., p. 123) observes, “The strange thing about these sentences is that material which is syntactically subordinate appears to be semantically superordinate”. However, if this were the case, we should then assume that the regret described in these sentences is not a real regret (a regret in the actual world), but a belief of regret. This conclusion is obviously wrong.
As observed by Chierchia and McDonnell-Ginet (1990, p. 286), the notion of entailment is based on how an implication arises, while the notion of pragmatic presupposition is based on the implication’s discourse status (backgroundedness). Therefore, we can claim that, on a certain level of analysis, know, because of its conventional meaning, entails p; whereas, on another level of analysis, know pragmatically presupposes p.
Abusch (2002) distinguishes between soft and hard triggers of presuppositions: hard triggers—she argues—encode semantic presuppositions in their semantic values, while soft triggers trigger cancellable pragmatic presuppositions.
More recently, Abrusán (2014) argues against Abusch’s distinction between soft and hard triggers and proposes to explain the difference in presupposition cancellation from differences in how presupposition triggers interact with the context: in particular, with respect to their anaphoricity, focus-sensitivity, and question-answer congruence requirements. This recent account, however, still maintains that cognitive factives such as discover, realize, find out, notice, remember, recognize, admit, know, be (un)aware that, etc. are more easily suspendable than emotive factives such as regret, be happy that, be glad that, be annoyed that, etc. and argues that “these differences in factivity correlate with how easily the complement of the verb can be focused” (Abrusán 2014, p. 27 ff.).
Hazlett (2010, p. 501). Sentence (14) is sentence (1) in Hazlett’s text (p. 501), and is adapted from Achenbach, J., “Cat Carrier: Your cat could make you crazy”, National Geographic 208 (August, 2005). Sentence (15) is sentence (3) in Hazlett’s text (p. 501), and is adapted from Zinn, H., “America’s Blinders”, The Progressive (April, 2006).
The correctness of the Italian data has been confirmed by 15 Italian informants. I have translated the Italian sentences into English, except for the verbs at issue, sapere and dispiacere, as I do not want to commit myself to any idiomatic translation in English. I must leave the issue of crosslinguistic correspondence for future investigation.
Note that dispiacere takes an indirect object in the dative.
Note that B is not being ironic in claiming that Marco is sorry that Sara moved to Sweden. As pointed out by Grice (1989, p. 34), irony generally gives rise to the conversational implicature that the intended proposition is exactly the opposite of the uttered one. In our example, irony would imply that B means the opposite of what he is saying, and this is not the case. B means, as she says, that Marco is sorry. Moreover, she implicates that Marco erroneously believes that Sara moved to Sweden and, by this implicature, she indirectly suspends the presupposition of factivity.
Hazlett (2010, pp. 499–500): “[…] traditional epistemology shouldn’t be especially interested in the concept of knowledge that serves as the meaning of ‘knows’ in ordinary talk. […] What I’m claiming is that epistemologists have every right to insist that knowledge (as they understand it) is factive—but the price to pay for this […] is to give up the linguistic method […].”
As correctly suggested by an anonymous reviewer, Hazlett’s position ”seems to amount to the claim that the same knowledge attribution must be supposed to have two disjoint sets of truth conditions, one for ‘traditional epistemologists’ and one for ‘ordinary speakers.’”
In a previous work, Hazlett (2009, p. 605) has claimed that what “knows” implicates in language use is a Gricean conversational implicature. In this sense, see Atlas and Levinson 1981. However, Hazlett does not seem to explicitly commit himself to this claim in his later work from 2010, where he generally claims that “knows” typically implies the truth of p. In his latest work (Hazlett 2012), he argues that factivity is a matter of pragmatic presupposition (with reference to the Stalnakerian notion of pragmatic presupposition).
It is well-known that pragmatic presuppositions are considered as cancellable implications. On the notion of potential (or putative) presupposition and the so-called cancellation analysis of presuppositions, see Gazdar (1979b, p. 64 ff.); Huang (2007, p. 81); Levinson (1983, p. 186 ff.); Soames (1989, p. 573 ff.).
As Stalnaker (1974, p. 204) puts it, “(…) using a pragmatic account, one may say that sometimes when a presupposition is required by the making of a statement, what is presupposed is also entailed, and sometimes it is not.”
The symbol ‘#’ is used to mark semantic unacceptability. The examples in (20) and (21) correspond, respectively, to examples (19) and (20) in Tsohatzidis’ (2012, p. 456) text. Tsohatzidis’ argument has been developed, in this case, as a reply to another example proposed by Hazlett (2010, p. 501, example (2)): “Everything he knows is wrong.” The entire example is quoted by Hazlett from a dialogue in the movie Titanic (1997): “He figures anything big enough to sink the ship they’re going to see in time to turn. But the ship’s too big, with too small a rudder … it can’t corner worth shit. Everything he knows is wrong.” Note that, as Tsohatzidis (2012, p. 456) writes, the word “wrong” is assumed here to mean “false.” On the other hand, Turri (2011, p. 146) suggests that the word “wrong,” in this sentence, be interpreted in the sense of “ill-suited for the task at hand” (the task being to avoid the fateful iceberg).
Sentence (22) corresponds to example K4 in Turri’s text.
Turri’s (2011, p. 147) argument regarding example (22) is given as follows: “Taken literally, this sounds contradictory. If anything serious hinged on the truth of this statement, I would object: “You don’t really mean they knew. You mean that they thought they knew, or some such thing.” If the person insisted that he “literally meant” exactly what he said, I would question whether he was using “literally” literally. Supposing he answered affirmatively and I believed him, I would conclude that he was incompetent or confused.” See, in addition, Buckwalter (2014), for experimental evidence.
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Acknowledgments
An earlier, different draft of this paper was presented at the Aspect Seminar (Lund University, Sweden) and at the Conference “Modality Corpus Discourse,” held in Lund, Sweden, on June 7–8, 2012. I wish to thank both audiences of my presentation. I am especially indebted to Verner Egerland and to Valéria Molnár for their valuable advice. Many thanks are due to Christian Dahlman, Filippo Domaneschi, Nomi Erteschik-Shir, Claudio Faschilli, Roland Hinterhölzl and Tanja Kupisch for encouragement and very useful discussions. For precious editing advice, I am indebted to Alan Crozier, Annette Hill, Dianne Jonas, and Nicole Tyszkiewicz. My deepest gratitude goes to Savas L. Tsohatzidis and to Allan Hazlett for generously offering their helpful comments on a later version of the manuscript. Finally, I wish to express my sincere gratitude to an anonymous reviewer of Acta Analytica for his/her very useful comments. Needless to say, all remaining errors and misunderstandings are my own.
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Colonna Dahlman, R. Did People in the Middle Ages Know that the Earth Was Flat?. Acta Anal 31, 139–152 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-015-0269-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-015-0269-5