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Accommodating Presuppositions

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Abstract

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’ (in a sense) 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.

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Notes

  1. Simons (2003) provides a helpful sympathetic discussion of the evolving details.

  2. I believe this is an intuitively correct characterization of what is presupposed in this case, which I take to be a referential use of the description; in general, as I argue in García-Carpintero (2000), all cases of reference involve “identification” presuppositions.

  3. Geurts (1999, 14) distances himself from dynamic semantics on account of its betrayal of Stalnaker’s truly pragmatic stance, and, like Stalnaker, he helps himself to a notion of expression-presupposition, defined in normative terms on the basis of the pragmatic notion of speaker presupposition. Unlike Stalnaker, Geurts also appeals to unexplained normative notions in characterizing speaker presupposition: “a speaker who presupposes something incurs a commitment … regardless whether he really believes what he presupposes” (ibid., 11). Geurts never explains where those requirements and commitments come from; they are prima facie at odds with the Stalnakerian stance he vows to adopt.

  4. Cf. Yablo (2006).

  5. Cf. García-Carpintero (2006).

  6. Bezuidenhout (2010) provides a good discussion of Grice’s views on this matter.

  7. We find claims along these lines already in his earlier writings: “the facts can be stated and explained directly in terms of the underlying notion of speaker presupposition, and without introducing an intermediate notion of presupposition as a relation holding between sentences (or statements) and propositions” (1974, 50).

  8. In recent work, Schlenker (2008, 2009) has advanced several new theoretical proposals, which he advertises as Stalnakerian alternatives to DS: both regarding the Projection and the Triggering issues, Schlenker contends that his proposals are pragmatic, not semantic. Schlenker is not clear whether he has in mind the truth-conditional or the constitutive view of the semantic/pragmatic divide, but I assume it must be the first one. His “Local Contexts” proposal (Schlenker 2009)—which offers interesting solutions to well-known problems of DS theories with quantified or disjunctive sentences—assumes a bivalent, non-dynamic semantics for connectives and quantifiers, and thus counts as “non-semantic” on the truth-conditional view. However, exactly as in DS, the account straightforwardly assumes that presuppositions are calculated in a compositional way “locally”, i.e., with respect to phrases that are proper parts of the whole sentence. This is why—I guess—Stalnaker (2010, 149–151) distances himself from Schlenker’s proposals.

  9. On the view that I will suggest below, an informative presupposition is a pragmatically created one: the speaker uses a device that conventionally presupposes something in order to get the speaker to presuppose it. The main reason for acknowledging the presence of a presupposition here, to which Stalnaker is sensitive, lies in the aim to provide a systematic compositional account of their semantics.

  10. Stalnaker (1974, 52, n. 2) attributes the following example to Jerry Sadock.

  11. Kadmon (2001, 219–221) describes these instead as cases of presupposition “disappearance”, on the basis of her characterization of presuppositions as propositions “intuitively felt to be taken for granted”. But I think this is a bad choice, based on an inadequate, manifestly overgenerating characterization.

  12. Abbott (2008) and Gauker (2008, 185) make critical points related to the ones presented below. They, however, contend that the appeal to accommodation to deal with informative presupposition renders any common knowledge account of presuppositions vacuous. On the argumentative line I will sketch, the phenomenon poses problems to pragmatic views such as Stalnaker’s, but accounts that assume semantic triggering such as DS can surmount them; I fail to see how claims of vacuity can be substantiated against views of that shape.

  13. Simons (2003, 267–269), who shares Stalnaker’s eliminativist leanings, shows that more complex sentences may pose difficulties for Stalnaker’s “idealized time” strategy that is described below. In more recent work ( 2010.), in which she deepens her eliminativist viewpoint, she doubts that the strategy might suffice to account for informative presuppositions, on the basis of considerations related to the ones developed below.

  14. In his insightful discussion of accommodation (to which I am much indebted), von Fintel (2008) makes heavy use of Stalnaker’s point about the proper time at which presuppositions should be satisfied by the common ground. However, his view of presuppositions differs from Stalnaker’s precisely on the matter we are discussing: he accepts semantically triggered presuppositions (cf. p. 138). There is no problem at all in accepting that speakers do make the relevant presuppositions, invoking for it Stalnaker’s claim about the time when they should be accepted, if in the cases we are discussing they are semantically triggered—but only under that condition. What is problematic, and I will be questioning, is Stalnaker’s claim that the same applies even if there is no linguistic trigger in the sentences. My account of accommodation in the next section is, I think, close to von Fintel’s.

  15. The point was in fact made earlier by Stalnaker (1978, 86): “the context on which assertion has its essential effect is not defined by what is presupposed before the speaker begins to speak, but will include any information which the speaker assumes his audience can infer from the performance of the speech act”.

  16. Of course, information in addition to presuppositions is also added at the first stage; consider, say, that Phoebe is speaking, which is not a presupposition.

  17. García-Carpintero (2000) promotes such a view about the semantics of indexicals, demonstratives and proper names.

  18. I take it that these are all examples of indirect speech acts, which is how I propose to understand informative presuppositions (assuming presupposition, like reference, to be an ancillary speech act); cf. García-Carpintero (2013). Some of them are described in the literature as non-literal uses—a category I would rather reserve for metaphors and loose talk. Whatever the best classification of the preceding examples is, I would suggest to include in it informative presuppositions.

  19. The proposal thus provides an elaboration or explanation of Lewis’ RA, the Rule of Accommodation for presuppositions. The way “presupposition p comes into existence at t” is by its being added to the common ground at PM.

  20. This is, I take it, the picture presented by von Fintel (2008, 151).

  21. Alan Ryan’s review of John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (“The Passionate Hero, Then and Now”, New York Review of Books, 2011, 19, 60) contains the following quotation from the book with a nice real life example; it refers to Mill’s first encounter with Harriet Taylor, who would become his very special friend for 20 years until the death of her husband, and then his wife: “In many ways, it was not a surprising match. Harriet Taylor was intelligent, pretty, vivacious, progressive, open-minded and poetic. But his admiration was shared by others—not least by her two children, and her husband”. I assume that this is the first indication in the book that Harriet was married and had two children.

  22. From the point of view of the present account, Simons’ use of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ may be a little confusing; on Searle’s (1975) well-known account of indirect speech acts, the act conventionally indicated (the means) is the secondary one, and the one indirectly made (the ultimate goal) the primary one. (Thanks to Anna Bezuindehout here.).

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Acknowledgments

Financial support for my work was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research project FFI2013-47948-P and Consolider-Ingenio project CSD2009-00056; and through the award ICREA Academia for excellence in research, 2013, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. Versions of the paper were presented at a LOGOS seminar, and at conferences in Prague, Leuven, Lisbon and Barcelona; I thank the audiences there for comments and suggestions. Thanks to Anne Bezuidenhout, Ambròs Domingo, Chris Gauker, Laurence Goldstein, Max Kölbel, Josep Macià, Teresa Marques, François Recanati, Sven Rosenkranz, Philipp Schlenker and Andreas Stokke for helpful discussion of some topics in this review.

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    Manuel García-Carpintero

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García-Carpintero, M. Accommodating Presuppositions. Topoi 35, 37–44 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9264-5

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