Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

148 Presuppositions and Pronouns
difference being, of course, that I adopt the binding theory. Another
important difference is that, contrary to Heim, I take the e-principle as my
starting point. This is not to say that I repudiate the i-principle altogether.
What I take to be correct about this principle is the notion that belief is the
central case in the sense that a presupposition X % that is is triggered within an
attitude report on person a can be satisfied, or bound, by what is being
assumed about a's «'s beliefs. But unlike Heim or Karttunen, I don't take this to
imply that the essential datum to be explained is how such a presupposition
can end up as a presupposition of the form 'a believes that %'. X'. The main
question is rather why attitude verbs are generally transparent to
presuppositions, and in this respect at least my perspective is exactly the
opposite from Heim's.
The theory of beliefs and wants presented below is the same as Heim's
semantically speaking: like Heim, I adopt a possible-worlds semantics for
belief reports, and concerning the semantics of want I will take Stalnaker's
analysis as my point of departure, following Heim in this respect, too. But
since I am not committed to the satisfaction theory, I do not have to claim
that the projection characteristics of believe and want follow from their
meanings alone. In fact, what I shall be claiming is that the projection profile
of attitude verbs generally is determined by their meanings and by the
presuppositions that they induce.
In this section and the next one we will be concerned with the
representation in a DRT framework of beliefs and belief reports;
presuppositions will not re-enter the stage until § 5.5. Prior DRT accounts of
belief and belief reports have been presented by Zeevat (1984,1989b), 1989b), Asher
(1986,1987,1993), 1987, 1993), and Kamp (1987,1990), 1990), who propose a structural theory
of belief (the term is Kamp's), which is to say that belief is construed as a
relation between an individual and a syntactic object, i.e. a DRS. The theory
that I advocate is not a structural one. Although DRT is a natural framework
for articulating a structural theory of belief, the two are not tied together.
One can adopt DRT as a framework for analysing belief reports and at the
same time construe belief as a relation between individuals and sets of
worlds, which is what I propose to do. 6
The classical possible-worlds analysis of belief (and the other attitudes) is
plagued by a family of well-known puzzles having to do with logical
omniscience and (non-) substitutivity of synonymous expressions, and one of
the main arguments in favour of the structural account is that it manages to
avoid these problems, because its principal tenet is that the objects of belief
are entities with a rich internal structure. If I hang onto the possible-worlds
analysis nonetheless it is because I feel that it is more consonant with the
6
6 Asher (1986) develops such a theory, too, but does not actually endorse it, inter alia for
reasons discussed in the next paragraph.