Abstract
Theories of presupposition in the tradition associated with Karttunen, Stalnaker and Heim relate presupposition satisfaction to the content of conversational participants’ epistemic states, usually modeled as sets of worlds. However, converging evidence from recent work on modality and from other areas of cognitive science suggests that epistemic states are better thought of as having the richer structure of probability distributions. I describe an account of semantic and pragmatic presupposition which combines core ideas from dynamic semantic treatments with a probabilistic model of information states and their dynamics in conversation, and argue that it predicts the core data of the proviso problem (Geurts 1996) without invoking ad hoc mechanisms as conditional strengthening accounts typically do. The frequently cited intuition that (ir)relevance is crucial follows without stipulation, and I present new cases which suggest that irrelevance is too weak to predict all cases of unconditional presuppositions, problematizing strengthening accounts which rely on it. The proposed theory is able to account for this new data and also for semi-conditional presuppositions, a sticking point for previous theories of presupposition projection. I argue that this perspective also gives us a reasonable line on several related issues, including the divergence between presupposed conditionals and conditional presuppositions, instances of the proviso problem in counterfactuals, and the contextual variation in the difficulty of accommodation. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.2 BibTeX info
Highlights
In combination with some pragmatic considerations about the best English paraphrases of probability statements, the theory predicts that an unconditional sentence should appear as the best rendition of a presupposition in the consequent of a conditional when it is probabilistically independent of the antecedent
This section sets up my account by outlining a satisfaction theory due to Klinedinst & Rothschild (2012) which is close to standard dynamic semantics, and describing briefly some motivations external to the theory of presupposition for upgrading this account to a probabilistic one. §4 gives some formal details of a probabilistic theory of presupposition along with general considerations about the type of pragmatics appropriate to the account
Whatever the semantic presuppositions that are triggered by factives which embed indicative conditionals are, they cannot — on our assumptions — have a probability which is systematically equal to the probability of the conditional consequent given the antecedent
Summary
Theories of presupposition projection following Heim (1983) are built around the notion of satisfaction in a local context. Geurts (1996) points out that these theories predict weak conditional presuppositions like (1a) in many cases in which the actual inferences are unconditional, as in (1b). In addition to being somewhat ad hoc, this approach suffers from a number of empirical problems noted by Geurts (1996), of which two of the most important are discussed here Such a theory must explain how the mechanism which strengthens the conditional presupposition in (1) can avoid doing the same in (3):. (4) If John is a diver and wants to impress his girlfriend, he’ll bring his wetsuit.
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