Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Presupposition 33
of this complexity, it is natural that the interlocutors will concentrate their
attention on selected parts of the content conveyed by an utterance; the rest
is of secondary importance, it is backgrounded. There may be many factors
that can influence this selection process, but once the focal points have been
identified, what remains tends to be presupposed.
This picture is admittedly vague, and it certainly does not deserves to be
called a theory, but it is not entirely without substance. The main idea is that,
although there may be many different reasons for backgrounding part of the
content of an expression, what is judged to be of secondary interest will be
presupposed if it can be presupposed. This allows us make some sense of the
bewildering variety of presupposition triggers. It may be that, say, factives
and aspectual verbs have little in common. But both types of expressions
focus on certain parts of the information they contain, and allow the
remainder to be presupposed, and if I am right, this is why it will be
presupposed. It will be evident that there is much more to say about this
subject. Unfortunately, however, I don't have much more to say about it.
1.6 A note on presupposition failure
Of the three main problems that I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter,
the problem of presupposition failure is the oldest, and in my opinion it is
also the least interesting. What happens if a presupposition turns out to be
false Suppose that Betty isn't married. Is (68) then false or just meaningless
Will a speaker who uttered this sentence have said something in any non-
nontrivial
sense of the word, or not
(68) Betty's husband is a teetotaler.
It is over questions like these that the famous battles between Fregeans,
Russellians, and Strawsonians have raged, but despite the controversy
caused by the issue of presupposition failure, I feel that its importance has
been overrated. To begin with, taking a purely observational stance, it is by
no means clear what the issue is supposed to be, with informants being
inconsistent over what the consequences of presupposition failure are. Given
that Betty isn't married, some native speakers of English will say that (68) is
false, while others will prefer to say that it doesn't make any sense. The
empirical bottom line is that the opinions about the effects of presupposition
failure are divided, and to the extent that a consensus can be attained, it
appears that speakers' intuitions are dependent on contextual factors of a
such a kind that only further doubt is cast upon the presumption that there is
a substantial issue. At any rate, this is the moral I draw from Strawson's