Summary |
Presupposition has been a widely discussed topic
in the philosophical and linguistic tradition since the beginning: Frege,
in Über Sinn und Bedeutung (1892), claims that the use of a
singular term presupposes the existence of the individual denoted. The Fregean example was that to give a truth value to
the sentence
(1) Kepler died in misery
we need to take for granted the truth of the
proposition
(1a) Kepler existed
Therefore, (1a) is a semantic presupposition of (1). Since the Fregean stance, analytic scholars have
given the following definition: a sentence p semantically
presupposes a sentence q if we need the truth of q in
order to treat p as endowed with sense, that is, as either
true or false. If the presupposition is
lacking, then the sentence p lacks a
truth value (i.e. is neither true nor false). Russell, in On Denoting (1905), launched a strong criticism of the Fregean
theory of semantic presupposition, contrasting the Fregean view with a new
“theory of definite descriptions”. From this perspective, every sentence is
either truth or false, and the role of a proper name (or a description to which
every proper name can be reduced, according to Russell) is to express an existence claim. This
solution allows to give a truth value to sentences with non-denoting terms, like
“The present king of France is bald”, which should be translated as “There is
an individual who is at present King of France and he is unique and he is bald”;
formally:
(2) ∃x[F(x)˄∀y[F(y)→y=x]˄C(x)]
In this case, given that there
is no individual who is presently the King of France, the sentence is false.
It was only in the 50s that ordinary language
philosophy developed a new concept of presupposition. Starting with Strawson (1950) and with Austin (1962), the
concept of presupposition was no longer linked to necessary conditions for the
evaluation of the truth of a sentence, but was a necessary condition for the
felicity or appropriateness of a speech act. With Stalnaker (1973) analytic philosophy
abandoned the notion of semantic presupposition to treat presupposition as a
propositional attitude. The theory changed its focus from the semantic level of
sentences to the pragmatic level of utterances, therefore including the
‘cognitive context’ of the speakers background of beliefs, assumptions,
presumptions, etc. In Stalnaker’s view the common ground of a conversation at a
particular time is the set of propositions that participants in that
conversation at that time mutually believe to be accepted as true and that, for
that reason, they take for granted. Hence, in this perspective, a pragmatic presupposition is a
prerequisite for appropriateness of assertions: an assertion of a sentence p is appropriate only if the
common ground includes the presupposition q required by p, namely, q is believed as accepted as
true by the interlocutors (Stalnaker, 2002).
In more
recent times, several scholars have treated the problem of presuppositions within
dynamic semantic theories, i.e. formal representations of language structure aimed
at modelling the growth of information in the course of a discourse, like Update Semantics (Heim 1992) and Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp
& Reyle, 1993). The passage from the level of singular utterances to the
wider level of the discourse structure has shown us that the distinction
between semantic and pragmatic presuppositions, that once seemed like a neat
division, is not so tidy after all. On the one hand, presuppositions are considered
an essential prerequisite for understanding the content expressed by an utterance
and for the coherence of the semantic relations between the sentences that
constitute a discourse. In this respect, therefore, they play a purely semantic
role. On the other hand, the process of presupposition accommodation is highly
sensitive to contextual factors like, for example, speakers’ willingness to
maintain a cooperative attitude with their interlocutors. In this view,
therefore, they can be considered a pragmatic phenomenon, related to contextual
aspects.
When dealing
with presuppositions, many theoretical problems and contrasts have to be
tackled. Specifically, there are three main open questions in the current
linguistic and philosophical debate:
(i) a first problem
concerns what ‘presupposing’ means, i.e. what it is for a proposition to be taken for granted.
The question at stake is to determine what are the mental states speakers have
towards presuppositions; in particular, when new information is conveyed as presupposed
and is accommodated within the common ground by the interlocutors (Stalnaker 2002, Gauker 2003).
(ii) A second major issue regards the role of
presupposition triggers (i.e. all the lexical items and syntactic constructions
that activate presuppositions). Besides a traditional taxonomy of
presupposition triggers, there are now new attempts to better explain the
mechanisms underlying the understanding of different categories of triggers and
to provide a new classification (Abusch 2002, 2010).
(iii)
Finally, a third central topic is the so called ‘presupposition projection
problem’, namely, the
problem of how complex sentences inherit the presuppositions of their components
depending on the logical operator in use (Heim 1992, Geurts 1999).
|