Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

The satisfaction theory 99
merely presupposes that —> ~ % X is true. 9 On the other hand, Karttunen and
Peters don't want to deny that under normal circumstances ~ 'V{X} \[/{x) would
license a stronger inference, namely that x X is true. The moral they draw from
this is that there must be some train of reasoning which on the basis of, inter
alia, the conditional presupposition ~ % X yields the conclusion that % X is true.
This inference is not itself of a presuppositional nature, the 'real'
presupposition ~ % X being just one of the premises on which it is based. In
the following I shall first criticize the general outlines of Karttunen and
Peters's account, and then turn to two arguments that have been proposed in
order to explain the alleged strengthening of conditional presuppositions.
Regardless what the details of the strengthening process look like,
Karttunen and Peters's proposed solution to the proviso problem is a priori
implausible. They assume a systematic difference between, for example,
sentences of the form (p{%}