Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

The satisfaction theory 93
(7) Either Fred doesn't have a Chevrolet or he keeps it hidden
somewhere.
This is actually a big problem for the satisfaction theory, because it cannot
offer a unified treatment of presupposition and anaphora. We have seen that
there are systematic parallels between anaphoric and presuppositional
phenomena, which are accounted for by the binding theory. If the
satisfaction theory were true, it would seem that these parallels are just a
matter of chance. This is unsettling, to the say the least, but I will not pursue
this line of argument, because I do not merely want to argue that the binding
theory is better than the satisfaction theory. What I want to show, rather, is
that the satisfaction is wrong because it fails to account even for the simplest
presuppositional facts. In the next chapter I will return to examples like (7),
and consider how they might be treated in a dynamic semantics framework.
3.2 The proviso problem
The principal problem with the satisfaction theory is not that it is too strong,
as (4) and (5) initially seemed to suggest, but rather that it is too weak. This
defect of the theory, which I shall argue is beyond repair, manifests itself with
conjunctions and conditionals, and it is to these that we now turn. Given the
definedness conditions in (2c) and (2d), the theory predicts that conjunctions
and conditionals have the same presuppositional behaviour. Let us look at
conjunctions first. A sentence of the form {%} /\ A \jI \j/ is predicted to presuppose
that X, x, which is correct: (8a) presupposes that (8b) is true.
(8) a. Fred's wife hates sonnets and so does his manager, manager.
b. Fred has a wife.
However, if we take a sentence of the form