A response to Abbott on presupposition and common ground

Abstract

Barbara Abbott's paper raises some interesting general questions about the model of discourse that I have developed and used, but I am not persuaded that the data she presents cast any doubt on the assumptions of that model. The examples she presents show that there are informative presuppositions, and appropriate but uninformative assertions, but that was never in question. Let me sketch the general Gricean motivation for my picture of assertion and common ground, and then look at her examples and arguments. The concept of speaker meaning was the fundamental concept of Paul Grice's account of speech, and it was his central thesis that this concept can and should be analyzed independently of any institutional linguistic practice. He differed in this respect both from some of the original * 'ordinary language" philosophers such as J. L. Austin and Peter Strawson, and from some later philosophers of language such as John Searle. The reason he insisted on this was that he wanted to give a basis for understanding the institution of language as a device that has the function of meaning things, and to separate an account of the functions that language was designed to serve from an account of the means that language provides for serving those functions. The hope was that separating means from ends would help to clarify the specific conventional mechanisms that language provides, and the way they interact with general principles of instrumental rationality in explaining why people say what they say in trying to achieve their communicative ends. One important upshot of Grice's development of this program was the recognition that, while language was a device to facilitate meaning things (for language users, the simplest and most straightforward way to mean something is to say it), once the device is in place, it becomes possible to use it to mean something different from what one says. In fact, given the general features of the concept of speaker meaning (to mean something is to act with a manifest intention to affect the attitudes of one's