Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

164 Presuppositions and Pronouns
as well as an external component (§ 5.1). This observation can now be
expressed as follows: if a presupposition is neither bound nor accommodated
within the belief context in which it is triggered (hence is projected to an
external position), it will often be construed internally, to boot. This extra
internal construal is not of a presuppositional nature, though it is based upon
a presupposition, construed externally. It will be convenient to have a name
for this additional inference: I will call it 'importation', the idea being that a
piece of information is imported into a belief context. In the following I will
elaborate upon this proposal, and contrast it with the opposite view
advocated by Karttunen and Heim.
Consider the following example, which I borrow from Heim (1992: 206):
(57) a. John believes that it stopped raining.
b. John believes that it was raining.
c. It was raining.
Some theories of presupposition predict that (57a) presupposes that (57b) is
true; this holds, in particular, for the theories proposed by Karttunen (1974)
and Heim (1992). For these theories the problem is to explain why, in
addition, (57c) would occasionally be conveyed by an utterance of (57a), as
well, and here an exportation argument naturally suggests itself. This is in
fact the course taken by Karttunen and by Heim. The latter argues as
follows: 13 13
[...] ] assumptions to be accommodated are supposed to be
uncontroversial and unsurprising. [...] ] So when we hear [(57a)] out
of the blue, we know two things: first, as a matter of the semantics
of this sentence, we know that it requires the presupposition that
John believes that it was raining. Second, we know that the speaker
takes this to be uncontroversial and unsurprising. Now why would
it be unsurprising that John has such a belief The most natural
guess is that it would be unsurprising because it was in fact raining
and John was in an appropriate position to find out. Of course,
these are not the only possible conditions under which someone
might form a belief that it was raining; but they are the most normal
conditions. (Heim 1992: 212)
13 13 Kay (1992) presents an argument which is similar to Heim's. This is one of two strategies
considered by Heim for explaining two-sided readings (the other, which is based upon the idea
that external readings might in fact be de re construals, was discussed in § 5.2). The argument
that Heim presents in the passage cited here is reminiscent of Karttunen and Peters's proposal
for dealing with the proviso problem, which was discussed in Chapter 3.