Presupposition

This is a technical term in philosophy of language and pragmatics for an extra

level of meaning in addition to the proposition expressed by an utterance and
its implicatures. Use of the notion of presupposition is intended to explicate
the pre-theoretical intuition that certain sentences or utterances take something for granted. Here is a
well-known example:
The king of France is bald.
Presupposition 149
In the terminology of presupposition, this has been argued to presuppose
that there is a king of France, and, assuming that the presupposition is satisfied,
assert that he is bald. In general, definite descriptions (here The king of France)
are said to give rise to a presupposition of the existence of the individual
described. In the now-standard terminology, linguistic items or constructions
that give rise to presuppositions are called presupposition triggers.
The following are often associated with presupposition: factive verbs, such
as know, and discover, clefting and pseudo-clefting constructions, and whquestions (see the
separate entry on presupposition triggers for more). In
these examples, the apparent presuppositions are given in italics:
Factive: John knows there is life on Mars. (There is life on Mars)
Clefting: It is John who arrived. (Someone arrived.)
Wh-question: Who called? (Someone called.)
What is taken for granted in making an utterance may not be satisfied.
The point of the example, The king of France is bald, is that here it is not:
there is no king of France.
There are two views about what happens when a presupposition is not
satisfied. On one view, the semantic theory of presuppositions, a statement
with an unsatisfied presupposition has no truth value, that is, it is neither true
nor false. This was the view taken by the philosopher Peter Strawson, who
reintroduced the study of presupposition. (Reintroduced because in the late
nineteenth century, the philosophers Sigwart and Frege had been concerned
with the question, and there was a similar distinction in medieval philosophy
between what an expression presupposed and what it denoted.)
Strawsons views on presupposition have been influential in semantics and
philosophy and they led to a great deal of work on systems of logic with a
truth-gap or three truth values. However, in linguistics the prevailing view
since the 1970s has been that presuppositions are pragmatic phenomena.
On this view, introduced by Robert Stalnaker, there are two possibilities when
there is an utterance with a presupposition that is unsatisfied. Either the
utterance is infelicitous, or (and this is more commonly the case) the presupposition is accommodated,
which is to say that the information that is
presupposed by the utterance but which was not previously part of the common ground is added to
the common ground. In other words, a speaker can
express certain information as though it were taken for granted, and if the
strategy works, this information is from then on treated as known. As Grice
150 Presupposition
had previously said, if a speaker says, My aunts cousin went to that concert,
the hearer would be expected to take it from the speaker that she did indeed
have an aunt and that her aunt had a cousin.
A striking property of presuppositions is that they appear to be preserved
under negation, in contrast to entailments of the proposition expressed and
most implicatures. For example (on one reading) The king of France isnt bald
also takes for granted the existence of a king of France and John doesnt know
that there is life on Mars also takes for granted that there is life on Mars.
This property is sometimes called constancy under negation and it has
been taken as the standard test for presuppositions. However this test is difficult to apply to some
sentences and does not always produce clear intuitions.
For example, what, if anything, does Who did not call? presuppose?
What is more, not every speaker who utters one of these negated
sentences presupposes what they are supposed normally to presuppose.
For example, hearing an argument about whether the king of France is bald,
it is perfectly felicitous to say: The king of France isnt bald. There is no king
of France. In such cases, either there was no presupposition, or it was
cancelled.
Many theorists think that presuppositions are cancellable, as implicatures
are. On this view, cancellation may be explicit, as above, but it can also be a
result of incompatibility of the potential presupposition with world knowledge. For example, before is
said to trigger presuppositions, as in:
John learned to type before finishing his book. (John finished his book)
But the following has no such presupposition:
John died before finishing his book.
The idea is that we know that dead people do not finish books, so the
presupposition is cancelled by its incompatibility with world knowledge.
Returning to constancy under negation, it is one example of what is called
the projection problem or the presupposition projection problem, a topic that
has had a great deal of attention. (The term projection problem and the framing of the issue in these
terms are due to joint work by the linguists D. Terence
Langendoen and Harris Savin.) Embedding a phrase or a sentence which usually
carries a presupposition inside a larger sentence sometimes does and sometimes does not result in a
sentence with the same presupposition. We have seen
Presupposition 151
that embedding under negation can preserve presuppositions. A common way
of expressing this is to say that negation is one example of a hole: a linguistic
expression or construction that, as it were, lets presupposition through. As well
as holes there are argued to be plugs, expressions which block presuppositions
entirely, and filters, expressions which let only some presuppositions through.
Verbs of reporting and saying are said to be plugs. For example, an utterance of
Mary said that the king of France is bald does not require the hearer to take
for granted the existence of the king of France. Logical connectives such as
conjunction (and) and implication (if . . . then . . .) are said to be filters,
expressions that sometimes let presuppositions through but not always.
The simplest filtering cases are ones in which the first conjunct of a compound sentence asserts what
the second part would normally presuppose.
For example:
John stole the Mona Lisa and he regrets that he stole the Mona Lisa.
Uttering the whole sentence does not ask the hearer to take for granted
that John stole the Mona Lisa, since that is asserted in the first conjunct,
before the hearer gets to the part that is said normally to presuppose it.
Several different elaborate theories which try to account for these
data have been formulated. The best known are due to the linguists Lauri
Karttunen (working on his own and with Stanley Peters), Gerald Gazdar and
Irene Heim. Almost all of this work on the projection problem takes for granted
Stalnakers view that presupposition is a pragmatic phenomenon, a property
of utterances rather than sentences, strictly speaking, and that presupposition
failure leads to accommodation or infelicity, rather than lack of truth value.
However these theories all look to semantics and syntax for explanations for
these pragmatic facts. The ability to trigger presuppositions is seen as a property of lexical items or
constructions, and the projection (or otherwise) of
presuppositions is explained in terms of the larger sentences components and
structure.
An alternative view has been maintained by many pragmatic theorists,
including Paul Grice, Deirdre Wilson, Ruth Kempson and Stephen Neale. On
this view, the pre-theoretic intuitions that certain utterances ask the hearer to
take something for granted are best explained without appealing to a separate presuppositional level
of meaning. Theories which make presuppositions
depend on lexical items and sentence structure are said to be writing the
152 Presupposition trigger
properties of a speech act, assertion, into the lexicon. This is undesirable on
general grounds and because it fails to predict that non-assertive utterances
of sentences (e.g. as a guess, a request or a question) do not generally have
the presuppositions that assertive uses would. For example, a guess that Martians criticize each other
for looping the loop does not presuppose that they
loop the loop rather it guesses that they do.
In the case of definite descriptions, the non-presuppositional analysis goes
back to Bertrand Russell. On a Russellian view of definite descriptions, the
semantics of The king of France is bald amount to: There is a unique king of
France and he is bald. Usually, but not in all circumstances, the main point
of asserting that the king of France is bald would be to comment on his
lack of hair, and the speaker would indeed be taking for granted that the
hearer knows, or would accept, that there is a king of France. But according
to the pragmatic view these are simply facts about typical contexts and how
the expression is often used and do not justify the setting up of a separate
level of meaning.
This analysis has a natural explanation for the fact that the existence
presupposition of definites sometimes does and sometimes does not survive
negation. On this view, this is a matter of scope. Depending on the scope
taken by negation, It is not the case that the king of France is bald, may
mean that there is such an individual and he is not bald, or that there is no
such individual. Presuppositional analyses usually explain these facts with an
ambiguity theory of negation, distinguishing between internal and external
negation, or between standard and metalinguistic negation.