Strawson on False Presupposition and the Assertive Enterprise

Abstract

Abstract Strawson’s views on presupposition and assertion are situated relative to philosophical and linguistic discussions in the second half of the twentieth century on the information structural properties of discourse. Strawson is most well-known for his critique of Russell’s views about definite descriptions and for his alternative account that appeals to presuppositions rather than entailments. Strawson’s views on presupposition are often equated with those of Frege and with the idea that false presuppositions lead to truth-value gaps. This chapter demonstrates how Strawson’s account of definite descriptions is intended to fit into a larger picture of the assertive enterprise, in which conversational participants design their utterances so as to put some issues in focus and others into the conversational background. This aspect of Strawson’s view is most clearly on display in his discussion of cases where the falsity of a presupposition does not wreck the assertive enterprise. Strawson had an enduring interest in this issue, which is connected also to his discussions of the subject-predicate distinction in logic and in natural language. The notion of degrees of identificatory force from Strawson’s later work is shown to be relevant to his information structural concerns too and casts his earlier work on definite descriptions in an interesting light.