Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Names 219
Since John treats anaphora as a special case of presupposition, he assumes
that the pronoun triggers the presupposition that there is a given person who
is female, and that it is asserted that this person is happy. There is no suitable
antecedent for this presupposition to be bound to, so it must be accom-
accommodated.
But even so John will try to integrate the presupposition with his
other knowledge, which is to say, in the present case, that he will connect it
to his representation of Mary. Thus John's belief box, in which his representation
of my commitment slate is embedded, may be pictured as follows:
(26) [x: woman x, x is named 'Mary', x is in the kitchen,
repre-
Bart believes: [x: person x, female x, happy x]]
(This representation abstracts away from the concerns that engaged us in
Chapter 5.) John believes that there is a woman called Mary, that she is in
the kitchen, and that I believe of this person that she is a female person who
is happy. Or rather, the person that John's beliefs are about and the person
that he takes my statement to be about are counterparts. This is why the
pronoun in (24) appears to be rigid.
By uttering (24) I have conveyed the information in (25), part of which is
that Mary is a female person; for this is the descriptive content of the
pronoun she (by approximation, at least). But when we ask John if what I
have said might be true even if it transpired that Mary is a man, his answer
will be yes. This is a reasonable answer because one very common way of
interpreting 'what is said' is by restricting it to asserted information.
If instead of (24) I had uttered (22), John would construe the name as
'rigid' for the same reason he would construe the pronoun in (24) as 'rigid'.
And he would say that the property of being named Mary is not part of what
I have said for the same reason he would say that the property of being a
female person is not part of the statement made by (24).
7.5 Concluding remarks
It is always possible to misconstrue a story, no matter how simple, and I know
from experience that my story about names is especially liable to be
misunderstood, so let me briefly mention some of the things I didn't claim
and don't want to claim, either.
First, I don't want to claim that names are pronouns. This is how Sommers
(1982) puts it, but not I. I do want to claim that names are very much like
pronouns. They both are presuppositional expressions, and have the full
complement of possible interpretations that presuppositional expressions
generally allow for. But, of course, the descriptive content of a pronoun is of
a different category than that of a name, which makes it much easier to
construct examples of 'blocking' for pronouns than for names. For example: