Lexical Pragmatics - Journal of Semantics

Reinhard Blutner 159ignores the effects of conversationalimplicatures which also influence thecommon ground. The present accountseeks to grasp these effects in a first andrather sketchy manner. Furthermore, itshould be noticed that I use the notionof information state sometimes as referringto a set of possible worlds andsometimes as a representational structure(state description or disjunction ofstate descriptions).It should be added that in the presentcontext we read K as know for sure (thisdoesn't presuppose the complementproposition). However, there is a problemwith this formulation that at leastshould be mentioned. In the presentformulation, the common groundcannot include propositions that someor all of the participants know to befalse. However, there are kinds ofconversations where this formulation isunsatisfying. For instance, consider aChristmas-time conversation wherethe proposition that there is a SantaClaus may be common ground, even ifsome or all of the participants knowthat there isn't any Santa Claus.11 Identifying state descriptions with setsof possible worlds and p(a) with afamily of sets of possible worlds, wecan write this condition in the followingway: Up(a) D cg[a].12 Beside the epistemic operator K weneed its dual P =j e f -1K-1. Hintikkareads K a 0 as a knows that (j>. It isimportant to note that Hintikka isusing the verb know in a technicalsense without the usual factive presupposition.In this vein, -iK,^ can be readas what a knows is not that p, andP a 0(=d e f -iK-2~i) can be read as forall a knows, it is possible that p.13 The presented arguments showing theadvantages of the present approachover the traditional approach based onHorn-scales are due to Rob van derSandt I thank him for allowing me toinclude his considerations in this article.14 An anonymous referee notes that atleast for the pair persuade to not-dissuadefrom the equivalence is spurious, sincedissuade presupposes that the personpreviously intended the complementThe referee's example: If John wasundecided about whether to vote forClinton, Mary could persuade John notto vote for Clinton, but she couldn'tdissuade him from voting for him.15 Only under very special conditions is itpossible to construct representationalpendants to the non-representationalelements, for example when we developintuitions about our cognitive system orabout our mental activity. In this sense,the representation of salience, relevance,and so on is possible. Usually, theserepresentations are comparative in characterand are not quantitatively scaled.16-With regard to the first part of thedictum, seeing non-cancellability as anecessary condition of entailment (orseeing cancellability as a sufficient conditionof conversational implicature), Iagree with Hirschberg (1991) andassume that it is right, at least if it ispossible to discriminate cancellationfrom suspension (the calling into questionof an asserted proposition), from contextualdisambiguation, and from certainforms of speaking loosely (for carefuldiscussion, cf. Hirschberg 1991: 28 ff).17 As assumption cost of the latter units Ihave stipulated $1. You may see thisstipulation as fixing the $-unit.18 An anonymous referee has suggestedmore minimal contrasts in order tobring out the relevant difference:?The government has a flat roof vs. TheMinistry of Justice has aflat roof.?The university has a flat roof vs. Thecollege of engineering has aflat roof.Downloaded from http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 12, 2014