Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

66 Presuppositions and Pronouns
should want to provide his audience with conflicting bits of information,
trusting that they will be able to figure out for themselves which ones he is
prepared to commit himself to. Secondly, why is it that conversational
implicatures may cancel presuppositions and not the other way round This
question, which Gazdar doesn't answer, is especially urgent because one of
the characteristic features of conversational implicatures is precisely that
they are cancellable. Thirdly, it would seem that presuppositions at least
logically precede conversational implicatures, because they contribute to the
proposition that an utterance expresses, on a given occasion, whereas
conversational implicatures are derived from such propositions. In more
authentically Gricean terms: while conversational implicatures are
determined on the basis of o/'what is said', presuppositions contribute to what
is said by a speaker on a given occasion. Of course, Grice himself would
disagree with the second half of this claim, for he is evidently unhappy with
the notion of presupposition, and leans towards the view that all alleged
presuppositions are to be explained in different terms. It should be clear that
I am not prepared to follow Grice in this -— nor is Gazdar, by the way. As
discussed in § 1.2, I take the common-sense view that presupposed
information is (presented as) given, and if we want to accommodate this
notion within a Gricean framework it is only natural to assume that it would
be part of what is said.
There is a further point that should be mentioned in this connection. Grice
holds that, in order to determine what a speaker says by uttering a sentence
cp,