Proviso Problem Research Articles

Presupposition projection as a scope phenomenon

The satisfaction theory of presupposition projection found in Heim 1983 has paved the way for a successful research tradition within dynamic semantics which has given rise to compositional analyses of a variety of projection behaviors. Since Geurts 1996, however, the promise of this research program has been called into question due to what Geurts dubs the “proviso problem”: satisfaction theory generates incorrect predictions in cases in which a presupposition ends up filtered which should not have been. I show that the satisfaction account of presupposition projection is nevertheless in good shape by revealing that the observations of Geurts are valid only under certain basic assumptions about how semantic composition works. To illustrate this, I present a satisfaction account of presupposition projection that incorporates a notion of scope-taking based on monads. The resulting composition scheme provides a setting in which the proviso problem does not arise, thus lending support to the scope theory of presupposition projection. EARLY ACCESS

Challenges for independence-driven and context-repair responses to the proviso problem

This note presents challenge cases for prominent pragmatic responses to the proviso problem. I offer examples of uses of conditionals if psi,,phi_{P} that seem to commit the speaker unconditionally to the presupposition P of the consequent clause ϕ, even though the sentence’s predicted semantic presupposition ψ⊃P is antecedently satisfied (contrary to context-repair accounts), and independence between ψ and P isn’t antecedently assumed (contrary to independence-driven accounts). The examples provided avoid problems with other examples from the literature used against pragmatic accounts. I leave the matter as an unresolved challenge for satisfaction theories of presupposition.

Karttunen logic for presupposition projection

Presuppositions of complex sentences are empirically distinguished from the propositional contexts that render a sentence coherent. This distinction is at the heart of the proviso problem for presupposition projection. Here we show that Karttunen’s inference-based approach in his proposals from the early 1970s can be used to directly avoid the proviso problem. Inference-based projection is different from trivalent accounts or satisfaction-based methods in distinguishing presuppositions from admittance conditions on contexts. This distinction is used within a new propositional fragment, whose rules for updating local contexts and satisfying presuppositions are explained using the same Incrementality principle of previous accounts, but without any of the additional assumptions that have been used to tackle the proviso problem.

On Presupposition Projection with Trivalent Connectives

A basic puzzle about presuppositions concerns their projection from propositional constructions. This problem has regained much attention in the last decade since many of its prominent accounts, including variants of the trivalent Strong Kleene connectives, suffer from the so-called *proviso problem*.This paper argues that basic insights of the Strong Kleene system can be used without invoking the proviso problem. It is shown that the notion of *determinant value* that underlies the definition of the Strong Kleene connectives leads to a natural generalization of the filtering conditions proposed in Karttunen's article ``Presuppositions of compound sentences'' (LI, 1973). Incorporating this generalized condition into an incremental projection algorithm avoids the proviso problem as well as the derivation of conditional presuppositions. It is argued that the same effects that were previously modelled using conditional presuppositions may be viewed as effects of presupposition suspension and contextual inference on presupposition projection.

Satisfied or exhaustified: an ambiguity account of the Proviso Problem

The presuppositions inherited from the consequent of a conditional or the second disjunct of a disjunction oscillate between a conditional and a non- conditional inference, depending on the context. This is problematic for most theories of presupposition projection in the literature, which only predict a condi- tional presupposition for such sentences (Karttunen 1974; Stalnaker 1973; Heim 1983; Beaver 2001; Schlenker 2009; Fox 2008 among others). The general response to this problem, the so-called ‘Proviso Problem’ (Geurts 1996), is to assume that in addition to the basic conditional presupposition, a non-conditional inference can arise depending on the relationship between the antecedent/first disjunct and the presupposition of the consequent/second disjunct. We discuss data for which this solution makes the wrong predictions. Similar data have been taken by van der Sandt (1992), Geurts (1996) and Garcia-Odon (2012) to motivate the DRT-approach to presuppositions. Schlenker (2011), however, has raised various arguments against such an approach. We propose an alternative analysis, which doesn’t have those problems. In our analysis, the differing presuppositions are the result of a systematic ambiguity involving exhaustification in a trivalent semantics: a non-conditional presupposition obtains with exhaustification, and a conditional one without. In- dependently motivated plausibility considerations decide which reading is chosen with no direct selection of presuppositions needed. We discuss how this approach deals with the various cases of proviso and the predictions it makes for biconditional sentences.

Dissatisfaction Theory

I propose a new theory of semantic presupposition, which I call 'dissatisfaction theory'. I first briefly review a cluster of problems - known collectively as the 'proviso problem' - for most extant theories of presupposition, arguing that the main pragmatic response to them faces a serious challenge. I avoid these problems by adopting two changes in perspective on presupposition. First, I propose a theory of projection according to which presuppositions project unless they are locally entailed. Second, I reject the standard assumption that presuppositions are contents which must be entailed by the input context; instead, I propose that presuppositions are contents which are marked as backgrounded. I show that, together, these commitments allow us to avoid the proviso problem altogether, and generally make plausible predictions about presupposition projection out of connectives and attitude predicates. I close by sketching a two-dimensional implementation of my theory which allows us to make further welcome predictions about attitude predicates and quantifiers.

A note on the architecture of presupposition

The Proviso Problem is the discrepancy between the predictions of nearly every major theory of semantic presupposition about what is semantically presupposed by conditionals, disjunctions, and conjunctions, versus observations about what speakers of certain sentences are felt to be presupposing. I argue that the Proviso Problem is a more serious problem than has been widely recognized. After briefly describing the problem and two standard responses to it, I give a number of examples which, I argue, show that those responses are inadequate. I conclude by briefly exploring alternate approaches to presupposition that avoid this problem. BibTeX info

Formal Alternatives as a Solution to the Proviso Problem

No abstract.

Dynamic Semantics, Derived Presuppositions, and the Proviso Problem

<p>The proviso problem (Geurts 1996) is a descriptive inadequacy of satisfaction-type theories of presupposition projection (Heim 1983). DRT models (Geurts 1999) predict the (b) (strengthened) presuppositions below, but DRT fails to model true conditional presuppositions like (1a).</p><p>(1) a. Presupposition<sub>sat</sub>: b. Presupposition<sub>default</sub>:</p><p> </p><p>(2)) a. Presupposition<sub>sat</sub>: b. Presupposition<sub>default</sub>: and</p>I propose with DRT that strengthening is structural, but within a fully compositional variant of Heim’s (1983) dynamic semantics.

Presuppositions, probabilities and belief

The proviso problem concerns presuppositions of complex sentences that seem stronger than predicted by satisfaction-type thoeries of projection such as Heim's (1983). We propose a probabilistic account, similar to Lassiters's (2012) for coordinated and conditional sentences, for the case of embedded attitude reports. For example, in (1), the satisfaction theory predicts that only (1a) is presupposed, but (1b) is usually inferred as well.<br /><br />(1) John believes that it stopped raining<br />a. John believes that it was raining.<br />b. It was raining.<br /><br />Our account includes a standard semantics for belief, but employs a probabilistic information state parameter whose value is dynamically updated.

A note on presupposition accommodation

The proviso problem arises for theories of presupposition whose projection component fails to derive certain presuppositions that are contributed by their constituent sentences. Mismatch-based satisfaction theories respond to the difficulty by tying the emergence of the proviso problem to presupposition accommodation. Consequently, when the context entails the projected presupposition and no accommodation is required, mismatch-based satisfaction theories predict that the relevant inferences will be absent. Evidence for this predicted connection between the proviso problem and the need for accommodation is provided by Heim (1992, 2006). Against this conclusion, Geurts (1996) has provided evidence that the proviso problem arises even when the context does entail the sentence's projected presupposition. We will argue that there are confounds in both arguments. The goal of our note is to identify the relevant confounds and to characterize the data that can overcome them. Our attempts to construct examples that control for the confounds and obtain the crucial judgments will prove unsuccessful, leaving the debate unsettled and raising new challenges to constructing the right kinds of data. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.6.5 BibTeX info

Presuppositions, provisos, and probability

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

The Proviso Problem: a note

Several theories of presupposition projection predict that some sentences which intuitively yield unconditional presuppositions should have weaker, conditional ones. For instance, If John is realistic, he knows that he is incompetent is predicted to have the presupposition that if John is realistic, he is incompetent, whereas one certainly infers that John is in fact incompetent. We summarize some difficulties faced by three solutions, DRT, Singh’s ‘Formal Alternatives’, and Singh’s ‘Interacting Alternatives’; we then offer a new analysis which is compatible with several semantic theories of projection, and which does not require the addition of a new representational module. In essence, we obtain unconditional inferences by assuming that speakers may ignore certain parts of a sentence when they accommodate a presupposition—presumably to simplify their computational work. They do so by adding to the context an assumption that would satisfy the presupposition of the sentence no matter which meaning some of its elements have. Depending on which elements are ignored in this way, a variety of strengthened presuppositions are obtained. We speculate on a possible mechanism (which follows some of Singh’s earlier ideas) to determine which of these strengthened inferences are in fact obtained. The analysis correctly predicts some new instances of the Proviso Problem in quantificational examples.

DRT with local contexts

In this note, we reconstruct some results of the DRT analysis of presupposition projection within the theory of local contexts of Schlenker (2009). The latter offered a way to annotate every sentence with variables that denote the various local context sets that play a crucial role in Heim’s satisfaction theory (Heim 1983). In standard satisfaction theories, a presupposition must be entailed by its local context. Here we allow a presupposition to be indexed with other local contexts, and we propose, following van der Sandt (1992) and Zeevat (1992), that presuppositions are preferably anaphoric to the highest possible context. The resulting analysis emulates some desirable results of DRT—notably its solution to the ‘Proviso Problem’ (Geurts 1999). But it arguably improves on DRT in some respects: it can generate genuine conditional presuppositions; and it yields more adequate results for some quantified examples. Several limitations of the theory—some of them quite severe—are also discussed.

Formal Alternatives as a Solution to the Proviso Problem

No abstract.