Abstract
This paper aims to vindicate the adequacy and usefulness of the notion of derived context (Stalnaker 1988), by showing how it helps to successfully account for phenomena that lay beyond the data that motivated Stalnaker to first introduce the notion. We will focus on phenomena related to Binding Theory (BT) principles (B) and (C) (Chomsky 1981, 1993). These principles account for an impressive array of data. They are subject, though, to well known counterexamples. As part of a more general attempt to defend standard BT, this paper will focus on one specific kind of counterexamples to the BT (some of which have not yet been considered in the literature), and will show how they can be successfully accounted for without any substantive departure from standard BT. All is needed is (1) to take the semantic restriction placed by the Binding Principles to be not that of co-reference (or co-valuation) but rather that of presupposed co-reference (or presupposed co-valuation) (as in Heim 1993), and (2) to appeal in the appropriate way to the existence of derived contexts.
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- 1.
See, for instance, Evans (1980), Reinhart (1983) and Heim (1993) for other kinds of counterexamples. I discussed and tried to account for all the different kinds of counterexamples to BT in Macià (1996, 1997). The general proposal in Macià (1997) was based on the same version of principles (B) and (C) that I present in Sect. 4 of this paper. The account of other kinds of counterexamples not considered in the present paper was based on additional considerations. Here I focus on that part of my proposal that is directly relevant to vindicate the usefulness of the notion of derived context.
- 2.
I take the idea of appealing to what is presupposed rather than to what is actually the case in trying to deal with the phenomena related to principles (B) and (C) from Heim (1982, 1993). Heim, in turn, credits Postal (1970) for this idea. The main difference between Heim's formulation of the binding principles and mine is that she states her conditions as purely syntactic principles that rule out certain co-indexations among NPs.
- 3.
We can make the sentence good, or at least much better, by changing the tense of the discourse to past, and by replacing “It’s suspicious that” in the last clause by an expression such as “This is why”, “This explains that” or “No wonder then that”. I do not think this poses a problem for the claim that what makes the last part of (3) good is that we are not presupposing that the individuals that he and him refer to are the same. The use of past tense and of expressions like “This is the reason why…” facilitates interpreting the sentence with respect to the context as it was before the previous sentence had been uttered. We can also see this in a text like (i):
-
(i)
A: I wonder why Tom did not come to the party with his wife.
B: Tom has never been married.
A: This explains why he did not come with his wife.
The use of his wife in the last clause requires that it is not presupposed that Tom is not married. This, though, is exactly the information that has been introduced in the context by B. Nevertheless, the use of “this explains why” makes easier to understand that what follows does not take for granted the information that this (in “this explains why”) refers to.
-
(i)
- 4.
Of course by distinguishing among the possibilities that are open according to what the participants on the conversation assume that the subject of the belief attribution believes, the embedded clause will indirectly distinguish among the possibilities that are open according to what the participants in the conversation believe (what they assume as open regarding what the subject believes). This is why I say the embedded clause does not primarily distinguish among those possibilities.
- 5.
See, for instance, Karttunen (1974).
- 6.
Notice that for most utterances of this sentence, he would not have a referent in each world in the main context, and this is why usually we could not say: “Gemma believed that some moonlight on the room's wall was a ghost. He probably was friendly” (we could say this only in a context where we were willing to share Gemma’s special belief in a ghost).
- 7.
See Stalnaker (1988: 165) for a brief discussion of the question of how to understand the idea that a world has two individuals whose properties are sensitive to facts about a single actual individual.
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Macià, J. (2017). Derived Contexts: A New Argument for Their Usefulness. In: Brézillon, P., Turner, R., Penco, C. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10257. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57837-8_6
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