Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Presupposition 17
conditionals have the same projection profile because both types of
statement affect their contexts in two consecutive steps.
This is Stalnaker's pragmatic account of presupposition projection. Like
the wheel, it is based on a simple but compelling idea, and it is just too good
to be wrong. There are two aspects of Stalnaker's theory that I want to
emphasize. First, it is a pragmatic theory. Sentences don't change contexts;
they don't do anything. It is speakers who employ sentences to change the
context. This distinction is an important one because the past two decades
have witnessed the rise of a paradigm, inaugurated by Heim's (1982, 1983)
work on anaphora and presupposition, which incorporates Stalnaker's
insights by casting them in a semantical mould. These developments will be
discussed at length in later chapters, but I should like to note beforehand
that, although they were inspired by Stalnaker's work, they depart from his
intentions in a quite radical way. By contrast, the theory that I advocate
remains loyal to Stalnaker's concept of speaker presupposition.
The second point that bears emphasizing is that on Stalnaker's account of
presupposition projection, it need not be assumed that presuppositions are
cancellable. We have seen that a presupposition triggered in the consequent
of a conditional seems to disappear if it is entailed by the antecedent, and it
is sometimes said that in such cases presuppositions are eliminated or
cancelled. In some theories of projection this is not merely a manner of
speaking, since they require that presuppositions are literally cancellable. 9
On Stalnaker's account presuppositions are never cancelled. If they
sometimes seem to disappear it is because they may be satisfied by a local
context. Thus, if q> cp entails X, %, the presupposition triggered in 'if q> (p then ",{X}' X|/{%}'
seems to 'disappear' because in the intermediate context in which ",{X} \\f{%} is
evaluated it is already given that X % is is true. Nowadays it it is is widely, though not
universally, agreed that this view is correct, and that, strictly speaking,
presuppositions can never be cancelled.
In the following chapters, I present a theory which is based on Stalnaker's
insight that presuppositions are pieces of information which are taken to be
given, either in the main context or in some local context. However, what I
have to offer is not just a theory of presupposition but a unified account of
presupposition and anaphora. That is to say, in the following I will adopt and
elaborate upon van der Sandt's (1987, 1992) hypothesis that anaphora is a
species of presupposition. This hypothesis will be discussed at some length in
the next chapter; the following examples merely are to give it some initial
plausibility:
(36) a. Fred cheated at the exam, and he regrets {it/that he cheated at
the exam}.
9
9 Theories that require presuppositions to be defeasible have been proposed by Karttunen
(1973a), Gazdar (1979), van der Sandt (1988), Mercer (1992), and many others.