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On the Nature of Presupposition: A Normative Speech Act Account

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Abstract

In this paper I provide a new account of linguistic presuppositions, on which they are ancillary speech acts defined by constitutive norms. After providing an initial intuitive characterization of the phenomenon, I present a normative speech act account of presupposition in parallel with Williamson’s analogous account of assertion. I explain how it deals well with the problem of informative presuppositions, and how it relates to accounts for the Triggering and Projection Problems for presuppositions. I conclude with a brief discussion of the consequences of the proposal for the adequacy of Williamson’s account of assertion.

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Notes

  1. See García-Carpintero (2016a).

  2. Cf. DeRose (2002) and Hawthorne (2004). Of course, the sufficiency is only for the correctness of the assertion, i.e., for its being permitted, like the necessity – if the condition is not met, the assertion is incorrect, or forbidden. Objections have been raised involving examples of subjects who intuitively know p, but their knowledge is felt to be fallible enough for them not to correctly act on it (in particular, not to assert p) in their circumstances (see, e.g., Reed 2010). I think these objections can be answered by taking into consideration the prima facie character of the correctness at stake; cf. Simion (2016) for elaboration.

  3. Abrusán (op. cit., 492) distinguishes two answers in addition to agnosticism: “The first … is that presuppositions are just an arbitrary special type of meaning specified by the lexicon, requiring their own set of rules for combining with other elements when embedded in larger contexts. According to the second view … presuppositions might arise via pragmatic means from assumptions about rules that rational interlocutors follow, just like conversational implicatures.” The first is the account I favor for most cases of linguistic presupposition. As has been pointed out before, however, there also are pragmatically triggered presuppositions; I’ll provide illustrations below. There are thus cases to which the second view applies, but I am not persuaded that it can be generalized to all cases. Abrusán goes on to defend what she takes to be a third, “cognitivist” account. See below, Sect. 4 for discussion.

  4. Cf. fn. 14 for an example.

  5. See also Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (1990, 283), Beaver (2001, 19–22), and Kadmon (2001, 13). Data suggesting that presuppositions might fail to project include the “metalinguistic negation” cases of “cancellation” illustrated in fn. 34, but also the data allegedly showing a distinction between “hard” and “soft” triggers, discussed below in Sect. 4. Related, it is to be expected that pragmatically triggered presuppositions (see next footnote for illustration and references) fail to project in some contexts. A very good reason suggesting that presuppositions might fail to be filtered is given by Roberts’ (2004) compelling arguments that focus presupposes questions: not propositions stating that a given question has been asked, but that the questions themselves are in the common ground. For such presuppositions can hardly be filtered, given that the antecedent of a conditional can merely express a proposition, not a question (see García-Carpintero 2017a).

  6. The judgment reported in (21) is far from unanimous. Cummins, Amaral and Katsos (2012, 4) contend that “it seems felicitous to use “Hey, wait a minute” to object to any precondition of the utterance, no matter how obscure (and perhaps even to an aspect of foregrounded meaning, if it is particularly surprising)”. A referee illustrates this: “Suppose I say ‘John can drive me to the airport.’ You can reply: ‘Hey wait a minute! I had no idea John had a driver’s license.’. (The referee goes on to say, “That John has a driver’s license is not, however, a presupposition of what I have said (it doesn’t project out of standard holes).” It is certainly true that this is not a conventionally triggered linguistic presupposition—a presupposition standardly attached to a phrase or construction; hence, not one of “what is said”, as this is usually understood. However, I think it is a pragmatic, conversational one (Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 1990, 285 ff, Simons 2005, 150–1). Whether or not it projects thus depends on pragmatic issues, but, to my ears, it standardly does in ‘John, can you drive me to the airport?’, or in ‘John will not drive me to the airport’). The issue should be investigated empirically, even though methodologically this is no easy matter [cf. von Fintel and Matthewson (2008, 184) and Tonhauser et al. (2013, 81)]. In any case, as emphasized in the main text, I only take the two tests as good intuitive indication of a distinctive phenomenon in need of theoretical explanation. Its proper definition, if the indicated phenomenon proves to exist, should be given by the correct theoretical account.

  7. Cf. Boër and Lycan (1976)and Levinson (1983), who dismiss presuppositions in part on the basis of the alleged miscellaneous character of the phenomenon.

  8. To repeat, by itself the intuitive data leaves open whether presupposing is indeed such a kind. Conventional implicatures and presuppositions might not be in the end properly distinguishable after all, contrary to the view defended here. Or perhaps, as Tonhauser et al. (2013, 81) argue, there is a wider plurality of “not-at-issue” contents, exhibiting variegated projective behaviors – but see the discussion in Sect. 4 below.

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

  10. Stalnaker, like Grice, crucially invokes normative notions in his accounts—cf. Stalnaker (2014, 46), and von Fintel’s (2008, 139) related “Stalnaker’s Bridge”. My disagreement with him concerns whether speech acts like assertion or presupposing are to be defined in terms of constitutive norms, as I am assuming they should following Austin, Searle and Williamson, or they could instead be fully characterized in psychological terms, as Griceans like Stalnaker think. One need not share Quine’s or Popper’s full philosophical outlooks to be skeptical that debates about essences may have a rational resolution, and I am not unsympathetic to that attitude; but here I am going along with participants in them, including Stalnaker, allowing myself to put aside such philosophical skepticism.

  11. 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 (see García-Carpintero 2000, 2017b) all cases of reference involve in my view “identification” presuppositions. This fits Searle’s (1969) view that the presuppositions of definite descriptions and other referring expressions are the felicity conditions for the ancillary speech act of referring.

  12. Stalnaker does not provide any justification for the claim, which I take to address the concerns that led Stalnaker (2002, 716) to a stronger definition of common ground in terms of beliefs about what is accepted. It is a one more consideration in favor of my view below that it does: presupposing constitutively involves a norm of common knowledge; manifest violations by rational and competent speakers must be non-default, and thus explainable.

  13. I take Stalnaker’s account of assertion to be compatible with normative views; Stalnaker himself wouldn’t like the combination, given the already mentioned reservations he has about them, fully articulated in his more recent work (2014, ch. 2) but present from the start.

  14. While Geurts distances himself from Dynamic Semantics on account of their betrayal of Stalnaker’s truly pragmatic stance, like Stalnaker he helps himself to a notion of expression-presupposition, defined in terms of the pragmatic notion of speaker presupposition: “In the previous section we defined presuppositions as inferences that are triggered by certain expressions, and that exhibit projection behavior. For Stalnaker, a presupposition is an assumption which a speaker takes for granted. These two definitions may seem to contradict each other, but the contradiction is only an apparent one. For we can plausibly say that a given form of words requires that the speaker presuppose something or other.” (Geurts 1999, 14; my emphasis). Like Stalnaker’s, this definition uses normative notions; unlike Stalnaker, Geurts also appeals to the normative notion of commitment 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 – prima facie at odds with the Stalnakerian stance he vows to adopt – come from. The account I’ll provide in the next section does explain it.

  15. I have defended this elsewhere, see (García-Carpintero 2016a). There is a serious concern that I cannot confront here, in that, like Stalnaker’s, but unlike DS, my account below prominently features traditional propositions. If pressed, I could assume instead Schlenker’s (2009) bivalent and static account, with which the proposal below is also compatible.

  16. See fn. 6 for illustration.

  17. I am assuming here that whether or not a trigger conveys that utterances of sentences including it are bound by instances of the norm (PR) depends on the compositional projective behavior of operators and other constructions. A trigger that conveys it in an atomic sentence might fail to do so when embedded under some operators (Kattunen’s filters and plugs). What it is for a trigger to convey a presupposed content should thus be established by a compositional account of the triggering and projection of presupposed contents, such as those offered by DS, or by Schlenker (2009).

  18. Simons (2013) classifies views on presuppositions into utterance and clause level. But as she notes, Stalnakerian accounts may be both, as in fact the present proposal is. They are both utterance level in a fundamental sense, because they explain presupposing pragmatically—as a normatively constituted speech act, on the present proposal; in terms of the attitudes that uttering speakers are required to have, in Stalnaker’s. They may be clause level, in that they are compatible with conventional triggers, and compositional ways for projecting them. Of course, while I hypothesize conventional triggers, Stalnaker is much less enthusiastic, appearing to prefer to get rid of them.

  19. If I understand him properly here, I take it that this gives to the “mysterious relation X” the sort of explanatory and descriptive role that Stalnaker (2002, 712–3) disparages.

  20. I discuss in the next section the alternative account by Simons et al. (2011).

  21. The social/communicative character of the present account of presupposing lies of course in its appeal to requirements on common knowledge. The prescriptive character of presupposing could also be defended in terms of weaker notions, such as common belief or acceptance, and consequences for assertion would still follow, especially if its proper analysis also invoked weaker notions. It is only to facilitate my presentation, which draws on the analogies with Williamson’s (KR) account, that I run the discussion in terms of knowledge.

  22. Williamson refers to Unger (1975) as a precedent for his view; Unger (1975, 263–4) mentions as data such conversational challenges. Cf. also Turri (2010).

  23. As indicated above (fn. 6), some researchers think that the HWAM objection just tracks non-at-issue content. Given that such contents project from embedding under negation, we cannot object to them with a straightforward denial; we need more roundabout ways. I myself feel that the ‘hey, wait a minute, I didn’t know/I had no idea …’ objection, with focus on the main verb as opposed to the embedded clause (cf. Simons et al. 2017 for the significance of this), is particularly pertinent for presuppositions. It can also be adequate for conventional implicatures if focus is on the embedded proposition; but it is then this that is being objected to. Otherwise I would choose some other circumlocution making this clear, “hey, wait a minute, are you sure that John came this morning?”, say, instead of (21) above. In any case, this is only one piece of evidence, intended just as part of an abductive argument.

  24. Cf. Vlach (1981), Davis (1992), Alston (2000, ch. 2), Green (2007, ch. 3).

  25. Cf. for instance Hindriks (2007, 400).

  26. Cf. Abbott (2008), Gauker (2008) and Simons (2006). I of course disagree with their contention that the appeal to accommodation to deal with informative presupposition renders common knowledge accounts of presuppositions vacuous. On the argumentative line I will sketch, the phenomenon poses problems to purely pragmatic views, but accounts that assume semantic triggering (including Stalnaker’s official own, which officially allows for it) can escape them. Cf. also the discussion in the next section.

  27. In some cases, the primary goal of the speaker is to convey the presupposition, as in the notorious exchange: ‘The new boss is attractive—yes, his wife thinks so too’. 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 twenty 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”.

  28. My main reason for acknowledging the presence of a conventionally triggered presupposition in these cases is given by the goal of providing a systematic compositional account of their semantics. As explained below, this is also required to properly account for the presence of a genuine speaker presupposition along the lines suggested by Stalnaker.

  29. Stalnaker (1974, 52, n. 2) attributes an example like (24) to Jerry Saddock.

  30. Cf. Abbott (2008), Simons (ms) and García-Carpintero (2016a).

  31. This is why Geurts’s (1999, 11) normative characterization of speaker presupposition, “a speaker who presupposes something incurs a commitment … regardless whether he really believes what he presupposes”, which is along the right lines, is doubtfully compatible with his Stalnakerian avowals, as indicated in a fn. 14. The commitment is incurred independently of the speaker’s attitudes, in that she “presents herself” as having them. We need to explain how this happens, and I think the evidence suggests that in some cases only a conventional triggering of the presuppositions, with normative implications in itself, provides adequate explanation (cf. Tonhauser et al. 2013; Abrusán 2016). The evidence shows that whether or not presuppositions are felt to be projected depends in complex ways on issues involving focus and question-under-discussion (cf. Simons et al. 2017; Abrusán 2016), but I take conventional triggering and compositional projection to be compatible with a deeper explanation of how linguistic presuppositions work, in part in terms of their “not-at-issue” character. See Sect. 4 for further discussion.

  32. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting the example.

  33. An anonymous reviewer pointed out that the latter utterance sounds much better if made after the speaker says, “I don’t know why I bought this ticket, it’s obviously not going to win”. To my ears, it sounds acceptable only if I understand it as something like “then/if so, you can throw away that losing ticket of yours”. The “then/if so” here makes it clear that we are taking the utterance to be justified only under the assumption that the speaker’s utterance allows, hence in a context in which the presupposition is satisfied.

  34. There are contexts—described in the literature as “presupposition cancellation”—in which nothing wrong would be felt with those utterances, as in this variation on Keenan’s well-known examples: “It was not me who infected it, it was not Mary who infected it, it was not John who infected it … in fact, I do not know that anybody infected the PC”. Given that the presuppositions of it-clefts are—I think—conventionally triggered, I do not accept that they can be contextually suspended the way that conversational implicatures do. I agree with Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet’s (1990, 314–5) diagnosis: the speaker rhetorically contradicts a remaining presupposition for the purposes of challenging and changing the contextual assumptions. Cf. the discussion of indirection below.

  35. A reviewer points out that these cases are also explained “if there is a knowledge norm on assertions and presuppositions are entailed by asserted material, assuming that the knowledge norm is closed under at least known entailments”. This is correct, and I agree that there is a sense of “assertion” on which what is asserted entails what is presupposed, for conventionally triggered presuppositions—one corresponding to what Bach (1999) takes to be what is said: a content explicitly articulated to whose truth the speaker represents herself as committing, including for instance conventional implicatures. But this notion simply disregards the distinction between at issue and not at issue content; only the former is properly assertoric content. In order to fully account for the data, we also need this stricter notion of assertion – concerning only “at-issue” content—that I am here contrasting with presupposing; see García-Carpintero (2016b), forthcoming for further elaboration.

  36. This might be what is going on in Donnellan’s “the king in his countinghouse” example; or it could be a case of pretense or indirection like those discussed below. Both accounts are in accordance with the explanation I suggested above in fn. 12 for the assumption about belief and acceptance that Stalnaker (2014, 45) makes without justification.

  37. As indicated in the main text, I take these to be examples of indirect speech acts on the assumption that I am arguing for here, that presuppositions are ancillary speech acts.

  38. Cf. Simons (2003, 258–61) on differences between Stalnaker’s and Lewis’ views. On Stalnaker’s “presupposition evaluation time” account outlined above, the presuppositions of a sentence are requirements on speakers’ attitudes, which might be in place in these cases, so there may well be nothing to repair; speakers at most need to adjust their attitudes to get them in line. On the present proposal presuppositions are instead requirements on the common ground (see also von Fintel 2008, 140).

  39. This provides an elaboration of Lewis’ (1979) 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 PT. I do not want to suggest that this appeal to brevity and non-verbosity suffices to answer the challenge that von Fintel (2008, 163–4) poses: we know that we can convey by means of presupposing, as opposed to asserting, a piece of new information which is sufficiently uncontroversial—otherwise, the audience might complain, for instance with the HWAM formula. But why do we do that? Why not simply assert such contents? Roberts (2004) has useful answers. See also Goldstein (2013).

  40. This explanation also accounts for an example due to Abbott, which Hawthorne and Manley (2012, 165) discuss: ‘Since you don’t know much about MSU, I’m sure you haven’t heard of the new curling center there. It’s pretty amazing. I’ll bet you didn’t even know there was a curling center in Michigan’. The audience is said not have the knowledge before the utterance, but they are assumed to have got it by PT.

  41. This is, I take it, the picture presented by von Fintel (2008, 151). It requires that there is an independent mechanism by which the utterance indicates a presupposition (von Fintel 2008, 138). As I have been insisting, it is not committed to mandatory conventional triggering and compositional projection rules; it just posits them in some cases. See also Sect. 4.

  42. Some writers argue against this; I have critically discussed their arguments elsewhere (see García-Carpintero 2016b).

  43. In her discussion of these issues, Abrusán (2016, 166–7) judiciously puts aside both presupposition “cancellation” under negation of the sort discussed above, fn. 34, and global accommodation of the sort that my examples below invoke.

  44. Abbott (2015, Sect. 3.1) accepts these results, subscribing to the significance of SCFC.

  45. Cf. Beaver and Geurts (2011, Sect. 5.1) and Abrusán (2016).

  46. That p is not already common knowledge is one of Searle’s (1969) “preparatory conditions” for asserting it, i.e., a norm additional to the constitutive ones. It is also the first of the “principles” about assertion that Stalnaker (1978, 88–9) invokes for explanatory purposes.

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Acknowledgements

Financial support for my work was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research project FFI2016-80588-R, and through the award ICREA Academia for excellence in research, 2013, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. The paper was presented at a LOGOS seminar, and at conferences and talks in Prague, Leuven, Lisbon and Barcelona; I thank the audiences there for comments and suggestions. Thanks to Ambròs Domingo, Max Kölbel, Josep Macià, Teresa Marques, Eliot Michaelson, François Recanati, Sven Rosenkranz and Philipp Schlenker for helpful discussion of some topics in this paper, to anonymous referees for a previous version who provided excellent helpful suggestions and criticisms, and to Michael Maudsley for the grammatical revision.

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Correspondence to Manuel García-Carpintero.

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García-Carpintero, M. On the Nature of Presupposition: A Normative Speech Act Account. Erkenn 85, 269–293 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0027-3

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