Introduction: Going Down the Anti-Formalist Road

Abstract

Abstract It is one of the theses of this book that many of the issues in interpretive theory can be reduced to a few basic questions in the philosophy of language. Consider, for example, the discussion of “presupposition” in Ruth Kempson’s Presupposition and the Delimitation of Semantics (Cambridge, 1975). Kempson begins by observing that presupposition can be defined “in one of two ways-either as a relation between statements (parallel to entailment, synonymy, etc.) or as a property of the speaker’s belief in uttering a sentence” (p. 2). The difference is between a formal notion of presupposition in which it is a feature of sentences as they exist in the abstract apart from any particular occasion of use, and presupposition as a fact about what is in a speaker’s mind-his understanding of the world and of the situation in which he now finds himself-at the moment of utterance. As Kempson observes, the possibility of deriving meaning from the formal properties of sentences can not survive the serious assertion of a speaker-based theory of presupposition, for “if presuppositions in terms of speaker-belief are considered to be a part of the semantic interpretation of sentences, then it seems that the meaning of sentences must be in terms of speaker-hearer relations and not … in terms of the relation between a symbol or set of symbols and the object or state described” (pp. 2-3). And if that is so, “one must give up the standard claim that the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meaning of its constituent parts” (p. 60).