part1 - 2. Presupposition(2)

part1 - 2. Presupposition(2), Materiały naukowe, The Hanbook of Pragmatics

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2. Presupposition : The Handbook of Pragmatics : Blackwell Reference Online
Page 1 of 17
2. Presupposition
JAY DAVID
JAY DAVID ATLAS
ATLAS
Theoretical Linguistics
Ç
Pragmatics
Subject
DOI:
10.1111/b.9780631225485.2005.00004.x
1 Frege on
1 Frege on Semantical Presupposition
Semantical Presupposition
One of Frege's employments of the notion of presupposition occurs in a footnote to a discussion of
adverbial clauses in ÑOn Sense and ReferenceÒ (1892). Frege (1892: 71) wrote:
The sense of the sentence ÑAfter Schleswig-Holstein was separated from Denmark,
Prussia and Austria quarreledÒ can also be rendered in the form ÑAfter the separation of
Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, Prussia and Austria quarreledÒ. In this version it is
surely sufficiently clear that the sense is not to be taken as having as a part the thought
that Schleswig-Holstein was once separated from Denmark, but that this is the necessary
presupposition in order for the expression Ñafter the separation of Schleswig-Holstein
from DenmarkÒ to have a reference at all.
I shall call this notion of Frege's Ñreferential presupposition.Ò Since Frege took places, instants of time,
and time intervals to be logical objects, to be designated by singular terms, if there had been no event
of Schleswig-Holstein's separating from Denmark, there could be no specification of a time at which
Prussia and Austria quarreled as after the time of the alleged separation of Schleswig-Holstein from
Denmark. The existence of a time at which Schleswig-Holstein separated from Denmark is required in
order to give a reference to a singular term designating a time interval that would include a time or
temporal subinterval at which Prussia and Austria quarreled. Thus, if the logical form of the main
clause Prussia and Austria quarreled is:
(1) ӠtQ(p, a, t)
There is some time or time-interval at which Prussia and Austria quarreled.
one way to understand the semantical effect of a subordinate clause is for it to determine the relevant
domain of temporal instants or intervals that fixes the truth conditions of the main clause. If the
domain is restricted to times later than the time t
s
of the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from
Denmark, then the logical form of Prussia and Austria quarreled after the separation of Schleswig-
Holstein from Denmark would be (2):
(2) ӠtQ(p, a, t)
tӤT
where T = [t: t > ts]. The truth of the clause Schleswig-Holstein separated from Denmark at t
s
is then a
semantical determinant of the truth conditions of the original sentence, since it specifies the domain of
quantification T (Thomason 1973: 302). In such circumstances it is understandable that Frege (1892:
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71) should write of someone who believes that it is false that Schleswig-Holstein was separated from
Denmark, so that the domain of quantification of (2) is believed to be ill-defined:
He will take our sentence È to be neither true nor false but will deny it to have any
reference [on Frege's view, a truth value], on the ground of absence of reference for its
subordinate clause.
It is clear that on Frege's semantical account of presupposition, on which the falsity of a
presupposition entails the lack of truth value of the sentence with that presupposition, the negative
sentence Prussia and Austria did not quarrel after the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark
would have the logical form (3):
(3) ÁӠtQ(p, a, t)
t Ӥ T
The negative sentence preserves the presupposition that there was a time at which Schleswig-Holstein
was separated from Denmark, since the specification of the domain of quantification is antecedent to
the assignment of truth conditions to the negative sentence. Thus the notion of a semantical
presupposition as a semantical determinant of the truth value of the sentence possessing the
presupposition offers one explanation of the preservation of the presupposition under ordinary,
linguistic negation.
The invariance of presupposition under negation is also noted by Frege in an example sentence that
contains a proper name and a one-place predicate, but his discussion of this example has features
notably distinct from the example just discussed. It raises a number of questions about negation that
recur in the discussion of presupposition.
2 The
2 The Alleged Ambiguity of Negation and the Contrasts among Presupposition,
Alleged Ambiguity of Negation and the Contrasts among Presupposition,
Assertion,
Alleged Ambiguity of Negation and the Contrasts among Presupposition,
Assertion,
Assertion, and Direct Entailment
and Direct Entailment
For Frege a logically perfect language would be one in which each well-formed singular term
designates an object. In ordinary, logically imperfect languages, singular terms do not satisfy this
requirement, e.g. Vulcan and the cold-fusion reaction are not guaranteed a reference merely by virtue
of being singular terms in the language. Frege (1892: 69) claims:
If anything is asserted there is always an obvious presupposition that the simple or
compound proper names used have reference. If one therefore asserts ÑKepler died in
misery,Ò there is a presupposition that the name ÑKeplerÒ designates something; but it
does not follow that the sense of the sentence ÑKepler died in miseryÒ contains the
thought that the name ÑKeplerÒ designates something. If this were the case the negation
would have to run not:
Kepler did not die in misery but:
Kepler did not die in misery, or the name
ÑKeplerÒ has no reference.
That the name ÑKeplerÒ designates something is just as much a presupposition for the
assertion [my emphasis]:
Kepler died in misery as for the contrary assertion.
In this passage Frege claims that the presupposition of an assertion and of its main-verb negation are
the same, and he offers an argument to support it.
It is evident from his argument that the notion of
P contains a thought Q
was assumed by Frege to
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be representable by (P contains a conjunct Q) or by
P directly entails Q
. (The angled-bracket
quotation marks around Ò̊Ò in Ñ[̊)Ò are Quine's (1951) quasi-quotation. The notion of Ñdirect
entailmentÒ is, roughly, the entailment of a subformula; see Atlas (1991)). In the case of the negative
assertion
Not P
, it was obvious to him that the Fregean senses (the truth conditions) of
Not P
and
Not P v Not Q
were not the same, so long as
Not Q
did not entail
Not P
. That condition would
be guaranteed if ÑÓKeplerÔ has no referenceÒ did not entail ÑKepler did not die in misery.Ò But what
insures that this non-entailment obtains?
If the negative sentence ÑKepler did not die in miseryÒ is interpreted as an exclusion negation (van
Fraassen 1971), paraphrased in English by ÑIt is not true that Kepler died in misery,Ò a vacuous singular
term in the complement clause might be thought to yield for the statement the value
TRUE
(rather than
no truth value at all as Frege might have thought, because ÑKeplerÒ would lack a reference). Since the
exclusion negation
Á̊
of a statement ̊ is true in a valuation if and only if ̊ is not true, even if ̊ is
not true because it is neither true nor false,
Á̊
will be true. But then there is an entailment of
ÑKepler did not die in miseryÒ by ÑÓKeplerÔ has no reference,Ò and Frege's argument, which supports the
claim that statements and their main-verb negations that contain singular terms share the
presupposition that the terms are referentially non-vacuous, fails!
Thus Frege's argument requires that the main-verb negation not be an exclusion negation, but a
choice negation (van Fraassen 1971). The choice negation
-̊
of a statement ̊ is true (false) in a
valuation if and only if ̊ is false (true). If the choice negation is paraphrased in English by ÑKepler
didn't die in misery,Ò but ÑKeplerÒ has no reference, one's intuition is that the choice negation is not
true. So Frege's argument survives. But it survives on the assumption that the negative, ordinary-
language sentence expresses a choice negation, typically a narrow-scope negation, not an exclusion
negation, typically a wide-scope negation. The choice negation permits a failure of truth value for a
sentence with a false (not-true) presupposition, but an exclusion negation will be true even though a
presupposition is not true, as we have seen. For these reasons van Fraassen (1971) formalizes the
semantical notion of presupposition using choice negation, but it commits a theorist of semantical
presupposition to the lexical or scopal ambiguity of not in ordinary language.
Frege's argument also illustrates another aspect of presupposition. Since
Not P
is not equivalent to
Not P v Not Q
, P is not equivalent to
P and Q
. So Q is not contained in P. The thought that
ÑKeplerÒ has a reference is not contained in the affirmative assertion. If the thought is not contained in
the assertion, not asserted as part of it or directly entailed by it, Frege thought that it must be
presupposed.
Here we have the contrast of presupposition with both assertion and direct entailment. If one asserts
Kepler died in misery or asserts Kepler did not die in misery, one does not therein assert ÑKeplerÒ has a
reference. Similarly, if one asserts these statements, the proposition ÑÓKeplerÔ has a referenceÒ is not a
subformula (or clausal constituent) of the asserted content. If ÑnotÒ is understood as a choice negation,
that ÑKeplerÒ has a reference will be semantically entailed by the negative sentence ÑKepler did not die
in miseryÒ but not directly entailed by it, just as that ÑKeplerÒ has a reference will be semantically
entailed by the affirmative sentence but not directly entailed by it. The difference between the
affirmative statement entailing that ÑKeplerÒ has a reference and the negative statement not entailing
that ÑKeplerÒ has a reference depends upon construing the negative statement as expressing an
exclusion negation. Note that though the exclusion negation does not entail that ÑKeplerÒ has a
reference, even the exclusion negation could be understood to have the referential presupposition that
ÑKeplerÒ has a reference. It is just that if the name does have a reference, the exclusion negation will be
equivalent to the choice negation. The point is that the exclusion negation can be true whether or not
the name has a reference. Its truth value is unaffected by the obtaining of the referential
presupposition. Hence it is not the case that in a use of the negative sentence understood as an
exclusion negation a speaker cannot presuppose that the name has reference. But if the
presupposition fails, the exclusion negation will be true, while the choice negation will be neither true
nor false.
1
In reconstructing Frege's argument I have implicated that not only is the English sentence ÑIt's not true
that Kepler died in miseryÒ capable of expressing the exclusion negation of ÑKepler died in miseryÒ but
that it is only capable of expressing the exclusion negation. This is a traditional linguistic assumption
in twentieth-century logic and philosophy, e.g. in Whitehead and Russell (1910: 6), Frege (1919: 123),
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and Strawson (1952: 78).
2
Frege's argument for the preservation of referential presupposition under main-verb negation will not
succeed without the assumption that main-verb negation ÑnotÒ (or ÑnichtÒ in his case) is semantically a
choice negation, which allows for sentences that are neither true nor false. For other reasons, which I
will not discuss here, Frege also accepts a negation that is a wide-scope, exclusion negation. So Frege,
and, as is well known, Russell (1905, 1919) and Whitehead and Russell (1910) assume that ÑnotÒ (or
ÑnichtÒ) sentences are ambiguous.
3
3 Pragmatic Presupposition
In ÑPragmaticsÒ Stalnaker (1972: 387Ï8) wrote:
To presuppose a proposition in the pragmatic sense is to take its truth for granted, and
to presume that others involved in the context do the same. This does not imply that the
person need have any particular mental attitude toward the proposition, or that he needs
assume anything about the mental attitudes of others in the context. Presuppositions are
probably best viewed as complex dispositions which are manifested in linguistic
behavior. One has presuppositions in virtue of the statements he makes, the questions
he asks, the commands he issues. Presuppositions are propositions implicitly supposed
before the relevant linguistic business is transacted.
Karttunen (1973, 1974) and others took Stalnaker's notion to be a sincerity condition on the utterance
by a speaker of a sentence in a context. Stalnaker's notion, in contrast with Frege's notion of pragmatic
presupposition (Atlas 1975), requires that the suppositions of the speaker be assumed by him to be
those of his audience as well. Stalnaker's presuppositions are what the speaker takes to be common
background for the participants in the context. Grice (1967, 1981), Schiffer (1972), and Lewis (1969)
had employed similar notions. Stalnaker (1974: 200) uses a Gricean formulation:
A proposition P is a pragmatic presupposition of a speaker in a given context just in case
the speaker assumes or believes that P, assumes or believes that his addressee assumes
or believes that P, and assumes or believes that his addressee recognizes that he is
making these assumptions, or has these beliefs.
4 The
4 The Introduction of Accommodation in Conditionals and Factives and the
Introduction of Accommodation in Conditionals and Factives and the
Neo
-Gricean
Gricean
Gricean Explanation of Factive Presuppositions
Explanation of Factive Presuppositions
Karttunen (1973), seconded by Atlas (1975, 1977a), had noted a weakness in Stalnaker's account.
Karttunen pointed out that a counterfactual conditional like If Bill had a dime, he would buy you a Coke
is sincerely uttered in some contexts in which the speaker does not assume that his audience assumes
that Bill does not have a dime. One point of uttering the sentence is to inform the audience that Bill
does not have a dime. On Stalnaker's (1972) account the proposition that Bill does not have a dime is
not a pragmatic presupposition in that context, and, on Stalnaker's general principle that Ñany semantic
presupposition of a proposition expressed in a given context will be a pragmatic presupposition of the
people in that context,Ò the proposition is not a semantic presupposition of the counterfactual
conditional. That was a conclusion that Karttunen rejected, so he rejected Stalnaker's general principle.
Likewise Atlas (1975: 37) emphasized that Ñthe assumption of common background knowledge is too
strong to be applicable to speech-situations as universally as Stalnaker and others would like.Ò I (1975:
40) noted that Ñthere are two strategies of the Communication Game that are especially relevant to the
problem of presupposition, the strategy of Telling the Truth and the complementary strategy of Being
Informative.Ò
Factive-verb statements, e.g.
Geoffrey knows that P
, are said to presuppose
P
. It is clear that
there is an entailment of the complement from the affirmative factive-verb statement: Geoffrey knows
that P ջ P, and of the object-language version of the referential presupposition: Geoffrey knows that P
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ջ Geoffrey exists. From an understanding of the negative statement, we may also infer these
propositions.
4
For the neo-Gricean the question was how to explain the inferences from the negative
statement by appeal to Grice's (1967) model of conversation as a rational, cooperative communication
of information. If we take the KiparskysÔ (1970) analysis of factive sentences seriously, we have, in
effect, two referential presuppositions: ÑGeoffreyÒ has a reference;
the fact that P
has a reference;
or, in the object-language: ÑGeoffrey exists,Ò
P
. According to Grice, when a speaker means more
than he literally says and expects the hearer to recognize that he does, the speaker's expectations and
the hearer's interpretation are governed by Grice's (1967) Maxims of Conversation. One particularly
important pair, for our purposes, are the Maxims of Quantity: (a) Make your contribution as informative
as is required by the current purposes of the exchange; (b) Do not make your contribution more
informative than is required. The neo-Gricean account of a factive presupposition of a ÑknowÒ
statement can then be sketched as follows.
Negative sentences of the form
Geoffrey does not know that P
are not scope-ambiguous but rather
semantically non-specific between presuppositional and non-presuppositional understandings (Atlas
1975: 42, n.23; Zwicky and Sadock 1975). On the semantical non-specificity view the negative
sentence is not ambiguous; it is univocal, and the so-called wide-scope and narrow-scope ÑsensesÒ are
instead contextual specifications of the indeterminate literal meaning of the negative sentence. The
literal meaning is neither the wide-scope nor the narrow-scope interpretation, but it is something to
which contextual information is added to produce in the hearer a narrow-scope understanding of the
speaker's utterance or a wide-scope understanding of the speaker's utterance in the context. On
Frege's and Strawson's view the narrow-scope, choice negation will be true or false if
P
is true, and
neither true nor false if
P
is not true. On the neo-Gricean view the truth of
P
is inferred by the
hearer in order to construct a more informative understanding of the negative sentence than its
indeterminate meaning. The syntax and meaning (the syntactical combination of its meaningful parts)
of the sentence constrain, but do not alone specify, what a hearer understands a speaker to mean
literally by an utterance of the sentence.
The specification of ÑnotÒ as a choice or an exclusion negation is also made by the hearer in
interpreting the speaker's utterance. The semantical indeterminacy of ÑnotÒ in the sentence leaves it
open to the hearer to make an inference to the best interpretation of the utterance (Atlas and Levinson
1981: 42).
The hearer's inference that ÑGeoffreyÒ has a reference is an interpretative one, in order to explain most
plausibly the speaker's asserting Geoffrey does not
KNOW
that P, instead of the differently stressed
utterance
GEOFFREY
does not know that P -
GEOFFREY
doesn't exist, and may be a real-time
accommodation, taking the speaker at his word, viz. ÑGeoffrey,Ò as referring to an actual individual.
I observed, like Karttunen in the case of conditionals, that speakers can make use of presuppositional
sentences to Be Informative. The analysis was as follows (Atlas 1975: 42Ï3): If a speaker intends to be
informative, in this case about Geoffrey's ignorance, the speaker must intend, and the hearer
recognize, another understanding of the negative sentence (viz. one other than the non-
presuppositional, exclusion negation understanding). This understanding is one in which the speaker
presumes that the proposition expressed by the complement of ÑknowÒ is true and hence a possible
object of Geoffrey's knowledge. This presumption by the speaker is necessary whenever he intends his
utterance to be informative (to the hearer about Geoffrey's ignorance). Likewise, the hearer presumes
that the speaker intends to be informative, and so assumes that the speaker presumes that the
complement is true. If the hearer does not know or believe, prior to the speaker's utterance, that the
complement is true, his presumption, ceteris paribus, that the speaker's utterance is meant to be
informative provides him with good reason to accept the complement as true. In this way, the speaker,
by reporting Geoffrey's ignorance, can remedy the hearer's ignorance.
Thus was recognized, for conditionals (Karttunen 1973), and for factive-verb statements (Atlas 1975:
42Ï3), the possibility of unpresupposed Ñpresuppositions,Ò which were given a theoretical explanation
as part of the strategy of Being Informative in the Communication Game.
Later the notion was given the name
ACCOMMODATION
by Lewis (1979) in his ÑScorekeeping in a
Language Game,Ò and an earlier variant of the concept than Lewis's appeared in Ballmer (1972, 1978),
and in the last few sentences of Strawson's (1950) ÑOn Referring.Ò
Stalnaker (1974: 206) had given an account of factive-verb statements that missed the significance of
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