Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

34 Presuppositions and Pronouns
observation that speakers' intuitions about presupposition failure are partly
determined by what they take to be the topic of discourse:
Confronted with the classical example, 'The king of France is bald',
we may well feel it natural to say, straight off, that the question
whether the statement is true or false doesn't arise because there is
no king of France. But suppose the statement occurring in the
context of a set of answers to the question: 'What examples, if any,
are there of famous contemporary figures who are bald' baldT (Strawson
1964:113)
In the latter case, Strawson notes, there is a strong inclination to say that the
answer is false, rather than meaningless. In my opinion, these observations
are clearly correct, and they suggest rather forcefully that, although
speakers' intuitions about presupposition failure are not entirely devoid of
interest, they shouldn't be allowed to playa a central role in a theory of
presupposition. 2o 20 As Stalnaker puts it:
I do not think any of us have very clear intuitions about the truth
values of statements which have false presuppositions, and so I do
not think that the truth value, or lack of it, of such statements can
be data against which to test competing generalizations. (Stalnaker
1973:454)
I will have nothing of interest to contribute to the ongoing debate about
presupposition failure.
18 18 This is very explicit in all of Karttunen's and Gazdar's work, for example, and in van der
Sandt's earlier contributions to the literature (such as van der Sandt 1987, 1988). More recent
publications tend to be less explicit on this point.
19 19 The possibility of such a rule is mentioned by Gazdar (1979: 128).