Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

The satisfaction theory 107
implies (32c), in a fairly strong sense of 'imply'. On the other hand it is
anything but obvious that (32c) is more plausible than (32b). However, if the
argument from improbability is correct, then the two preceding statements
cannot be true together, because judging that (32c) is more plausible than
(32b) is tantamount to judging that (32a) implies (32c). But since these two
statements are, evidently, not the same thing, the argument must be wrong.
Nor is this problem restricted to a single example:
(33) a. If Mwamba is a monarchy, then Mzamba is a monarchy (too).
b. Mwamba is a monarchy —> ~ Mzamba is a sovereign state
c. Mzamba is a sovereign state.
(34) a. If Mwamba is a monarchy, then the king of Mzamba will
support it.
b. Mwamba is a monarchy —> ~ Mzamba has a king
c. Mzamba has a king.
(35) a. If Mwamba is a monarchy, then the king of Mzamba will
continue to support it.
b. Mwamba is a monarchy —> ~ until now, the king of Mzamba has
supported Mwamba
c. Until now, the king of Mzamba has supported Mwamba.
The argument from improbability requires that the strong intuition that the
(a) sentences in (33)-(35) imply the corresponding (c) sentences should be
matched by an equally strong intuition that the (c) sentences are more
plausible than the corresponding (b) sentences. But there is no such match.
One of my objections against the truth-functionality argument was that it
makes the strengthening of conditional presuppositions contingent upon
conversational implicatures, and thus leads us to expect, wrongly, that these
inferences are cancellable. Although the argument from improbability
doesn't rely upon conversational implicatures, the foregoing observations
suggest that a similar objection applies in this case, too. The reason is that
this argument crucially relies upon judgements of relative probability, which
aren't always clear cut. But if an inference is based upon uncertain premises,
we shouldn't expect it to be particularly solid. And as we have seen, this
expectation is simply incorrect. There are differences of a presuppositional
nature between sentences of the form ~ '!'{X} \|/{%} and ~ ,!,,13 \j/, 13 but it is
not that if Z/we conclude that % X from either of these, the inference is is more
13 13 In particular, in q> ~ '!'{X}, \|/{%}, but not in