Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

The satisfaction theory 109
entertain several hypotheses about the common ground, some of which he
may deem to be more plausible than others. An interesting consequence of
this proposal is that it opens a new perspective on one of the problems that I
discussed in the foregoing. I observed that it is difficult to see how % X can be
more plausible than the weaker ~ i, X, as the argument from improbability
requires, but Beaver would say that this difficulty only arises because I have
been asking the wrong question. What I should have asked instead,
according to Beaver, is whether the hearer finds it more likely that the
common ground satisfies X / or just q> ~ %. X. And the hearer's answer to this
question might very well be that the former possibility is more likely than the
latter.
Although Beaver's proposal offers a solution to one of the problems that
have come up in the foregoing, I don't see that it improves matters in others
than this respect. Beaver shows how the satisfaction theorist can consistently
adopt the argument from improbability without having to give up on the
standard dynamic semantics of § 3.1. However, as I have pointed out in this
section, it is clear that at least for conditionals this semantics is inadequate,
and it still remains to be seen how a more sophisticated semantics of
conditionals can be incorporated into the satisfaction framework. Secondly,
Beaver's version of the improbability argument does nothing to alleviate the
problems illustrated by (32)-(35). Indeed, it seems to me that if, instead of
asking whether the (c) propositions are more plausible than the (b)
propositions, we now ask which ones are more likely to be part of the
common ground, it becomes even more questionable that there will be a
majority vote for (c), as the argument from improbability requires. And
finally, Beaver's version of the argument of improbability doesn't account for
the difference between, for example, (37a) and (37b).
Summarizing the results of this section and the previous two, I have argued
against the idea that the proviso problem can be solved along the lines first
suggested by Karttunen and Peters. I have objected against the very idea of
deriving the required inferences in two steps, and have criticized two
arguments that have been proposed to account for the alleged strengthening
of conditional presuppositions. My main conclusions are: that the
conditional presuppositions which the satisfaction theory predicts are mere
artefacts of that theory; that the notion that the observed inferences are to be
derived in a two-step process is ill conceived; and that there is at present no
account that explains how this strengthening might be accomplished.
3.5 Further problems
The main problem with the satisfaction theory is that certain of the presuppositions
that it predicts are conditionalized whereas intuitively presup-
they