Nothing but the Truth - Vienna, 11. 3.

2012

Pragmatic Presupposition as Truth-determinat in Ordinary Language

Luk Likavan Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

1. Introduction
One of the most fundamental thoughts raised in the field of the formal study of language in the last decades, and possibly the most important one, is that pragmatic factors should play huge role in determining the meaning of our utterances in ordinary language. Questioning the meaning of the sentence is not enough in ordinary language, because a wide range of sentences is context-dependant and thus we need to look for their meaning as they are uttered. So it seems like in the ordinary language we need a kind of support for the hardcore semantics by including pragmatic factors, which play a role of final arbiters of what is said by given utterance. Yet recently, something more seems to be close to truth that pragmatics can have an influence on truth-value of ordinary language sentences as uttered by speakers in linguistic situations. The aim of this talk is to convince you that the kind of determination I am talking about is the direct one (not just indirect trough determination of the meaning). The result will be that in ordinary language the realm of truth is not strictly a domain of semantics, but pragmatics comes to play with the offer to cooperate in finding the truth of what people are talking about. So what is the way in which pragmatics might directly influence the truth of a sentence? In my opinion, it is possible through a pragmatic factor known as pragmatic, or also speaker1 presupposition. This notion was introduced in several papers at the beginning of 1970s by American philosopher Robert Stalnaker.2 This factor is somehow tricky because of a large number of definitions made by different people using different terminology.3 I would like to stick on stalnakerian orthodoxy; however it does not imply that the definition will be an easy job. We can shine a light on this notion by a brief presentation of Stalnakers predecessors in discussion on the phenomena of presupposition.

2. Predecessors

1 2

For certain peculiarities of this notion I will show later. See (Stalnaker, 1970), (Stalnaker, 1973) and (Stalnaker, 1999). 3 A well-taken comment was made in this connection by Saul Kripke, who said: ... to some degree Justice Stewarts comment about pornography holds here: we all recognize it when we see it even if we cant say exactly what it is. See (Stalnaker, 2002, p. 712).

Nothing but the Truth - Vienna, 11. 3. 2012 Peter F. Strawson in his famous article On Referring remarks that it does not seem that the ordinary language sentences must necessarily have a truth-value. In some contexts, utterances lack truth-values because the presuppositional requirement is not satisfied. Def. 1 (Strawsons presupposition): Statement S presupposes a statement S iff the truth of S is a precondition of the truth-or-falsity of S (Strawson, 1952, p. 175).

Take the sentence The king of France is wise. It presupposes that there exists the unique king of France at the moment of the utterance. Without the truth of the presupposition, there cannot be stated any self-contradictoriness of this statement, because for the statement S, the question of whether its true or false simply doesnt arise (Strawson, 1950, p. 330). How this relation behaves? Its behaviour is similar to material conditional, but with an important difference. Take the statement S SP S If the relation between both formulas is conditional, this statement is self-contradictory. This does not hold for presupposition, since without the truth of the consequent, there cannot be stated any self-contradictoriness of this statement, because for the formula S, the question of whether its true or false simply doesnt arise (Strawson, 1950, p. 330). To make this statement self-contradictory, we need to know the truth-value of both sides of the relation. But the antecedent of statement is beyond truth and falsity. Hence the whole statement is beyond the category of self-contradictoriness, or as Strawson says, the logical absurdity. Strawson provides us with the first inside to the notion of presupposition. The second one is given by Bas van Fraasen with his definition of semantic presupposition. He constructs its definition by means of the elementary semantic relation of necessitation. From this relation other relations should be built up, including implication. Presupposition and implication are similar in the sense that for the both relations, an antecedent necessitates a consequent. The definition is as follows:

Nothing but the Truth - Vienna, 11. 3. 2012 Def. 2 (Necessitation): A necessitates B iff whenever A is true, B is also true (van Fraassen, 1968, p. 138). This gives us a solid ground for definition of semantic presupposition: Def. 3 (Semantic presupposition): A (semantically) presupposes B iff: a) A necessitates B and, b) A necessitates B.4 After these preliminaries, lets finally look at what Robert Stalnaker says about presupposition and what it has to do with the truth of the ordinary language sentences.

3. Stalnaker and pragmatic presupposition

With Stalnaker on a scene, things go radically different. Contrary to the notion of semantic presupposition, it is not a relation between statements, but it is a propositional attitude.5 This means that it is a case of relation between some subject (agent) and proposition. Because of this, pragmatic presupposition is often called also a speaker presupposition. To clarify this relation, I will show several characteristics Stalnaker attributes to it and expose some intuitions, which lead him to this notion of presupposition.6 In the first place, pragmatic presupposition is the public attitude: ... one presupposes that only if one presupposes that others presuppose it as well (Stalnaker, 2002, p. 701). This is a feature based on the assumption that speaker presupposition takes places as a part of the shared informational background, which is present in every conversation and which makes this conversation possible. It should be described as implicit assumptions preceding a linguistic behaviour (Stalnaker, 1999, p. 38). Some of these assumptions should be described as the live options agents want to distinguish between at a current stage of conversation. It means that on the basement of presupposed information, some possible states of worlds are open to
4 5

According to (van Fraassen, 1968, p. 138). I will not discuss the dispositional account of presupposition mentioned in (Simons, 2003) and in (Stalnaker, 1999): Presupposing is not a mental attitude like believing, but is rather a linguistic disposition a disposition to behave in ones use of language as if one had certain beliefs, or were making certain assumption. (p. 54) I found it compatible with common ground view used in this paper, since if an agent has a disposition to behave in a certain way, this disposition is introspectively reflected in the moment the disposition is uncovered by agent s behaviour. If the agent is disposed to do X, he finds out it at the moment he does X. 6 From now, I will use the term presupposition in rather ambiguous way: it denotes both the relation of propositional attitude and also the object of this attitude what is presupposed, i. e. the proposition itself. The context, I hope so, will always make clear which of these two I mean.

Nothing but the Truth - Vienna, 11. 3. 2012 consideration for the members of discourse. This view is supported by some truisms about conversation: (i) Every agent starts communication in some non-empty epistemic state, (ii) Agents change their states in the course of the conversation, (iii) One of the purposes of communication is to share some information with other agents, (iv) This change means that a new piece of information is accepted and a) new epistemic alternatives raise for agent, b) some epistemic alternatives are eliminated from the considerations,7 (v) To communicate efficiently, agents need to cooperate, or they must at least presume that the others want to cooperate and behave rationally.8 Stalnaker calls the informational background mentioned above the common ground and describes it as the shared beliefs of discourse participants. It is worth to emphasize that these beliefs include not only information about the state of the world, but also information about ongoing conversation (i. e. information about the agents, the language in which the conversation is lead, its time and place or the information about what speech acts were made in the course of the conversation). This would not be seen as something unusual, since the ongoing conversation is itself an event in the world and thus information about it is indeed information about what the state of the world is. Presuppositions make constraints on the appropriateness of utterances in conversation. We have already seen this in Strawson. But pragmatic presuppositions are attitudes of a very various kind. They include both strawsonian and semantic presuppositions and a lot of others besides these two (just remember what a wide range of information takes place in the common ground). And these two notions are modified to fit Stalnakers definition of presupposition, so they are also propositional attitudes.

One can imagine it as the game between master and servant from (Lewis, 1979). The servant has the limits of what he is permitted to do. These permissions change by his masters statements about what is and what is not the slave allowed doing. 8 This last assumption is inspired by the Cooperative Principle of H. P. Grice: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. (Grice, 1989, p. 26) Some other justification comes from game theory, where the rationality of player is the necessary condition for finding the effective solution of a game. Otherwise the game is unpredictable and we cant apply our intuitions about what will going on at which state of game in our words, if the agent is explicitly uncooperative, we are unable to find out what he intends to do with linguistic behaviour he performs. The communication fails because interpretation is impossible.

Nothing but the Truth - Vienna, 11. 3. 2012 Yet they are more stable than others, because they are carried by every utterance of some sentence. For example, the presupposition that France has the unique king in (1) is pragmatic presupposition conveyed by all of its use. If this presupposition is not fulfilled, the use of (1) is a) inappropriate in given context and b) we are unable to interpret it neither as true nor false. What is important, b) is possible only if a) is satisfied, but this relation is not symmetric: from appropriateness of the use, the interpretation does not necessarily follow, but conversely this must necessary hold we cant state a truth-value of something obviously inappropriate. In this place, we need to make a slight yet very important modification of the notion of common ground. We said that it is the set of the shared beliefs of the agents in the conversation. It seems that it is too strong to say this. Imagine that someone is lying to you. He certainly does not believe in what he says, because if he had believed in what he said, he would take the proposition he believe as true in all of his doxastic alternatives (Hintikka, 1962, p. 49). Rather he pretends to believe in it, since he knows very well that he tells a lie. But in his pretence, he at least must accept this proposition to be true for the purpose of conversation. The acceptance is the propositional attitude which does not require the agent to take it as true in all the alternatives he considers this proposition is true only in possible worlds which are for speaker the live options at the present stage of conversation. The proposition shall be treated this way just for some reason, e. g. planning, illustration or simplifying a communication. In general, these acceptances are the genuine parts of the common ground. And presuppositions are attitudes towards these acceptances. These acceptances, as well as beliefs, are shared. So to make it clear: pragmatic presuppositions are beliefs about what is a part of a common ground what is mutually accepted for the purpose of conversation. Pragmatic presupposition is propositional attitude of second order, because it is the attitude towards another attitude. Now, we can finally define the pragmatic presupposition: Def. 4 (Pragmatic presupposition): An agent pragmatically presupposes that iff he accepts that , he believes that other accepts, that and he believes that other believe that he accepts .

4. Proposition, context and truth in ordinary language

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Nothing but the Truth - Vienna, 11. 3. 2012 We have already used the notion of proposition. Now, it is time to define it and look at it closer. We will start with preliminary definition, which is to be modified in this chapter: Def. 5.1 (Proposition): Proposition is a function from possible worlds into truthvalues. (Kripke, 1963, p. 84) This is probably the simplest account we can have, of course if we do not want to take propositions as primitive objects. But what for us is a primitive entity is the possible world. This is one of the moments of stalnakerian orthodoxy. According to (Stalnaker, 1970), it is sufficient for our purposes to give only informal and sort of pre-theoretical account of possible worlds. And that is roughly similar to the one of Kripkes based on the notion of counterfactual situations, i. e. some situation opposite to actual one (e. g. if you drink a coffee right now, in counterfactual situation you are not doing so): (1) Generally, things aren't 'found out' about a counterfactual situation, they are stipulated; (2) possible worlds need not be given purely qualitatively, as if we were looking at them through a telescope. (Kripke, 1980, pp. 4950) I would like to state together with Kripke and Stalnaker that possible worlds need to be viewed just as a purely descriptive apparatus for the study of language and thought. Now, there can be an accessibility relation defined in the logic of presuppositions. This reflects an important fact, that the users of ordinary language are beings with limited cognitive capacity. We cant manage to go through all of the possible worlds to find the truth of what is said, we are always doing so related to some limited context, described as the set W, which gives us the possible worlds that are the objects of our mutual interest in search for truth. The question arises: arent we obliged to redefine the proposition, if we are speaking of the truth in ordinary language? We know very well that we can construct the formal languages that can be interpreted towards infinite set of possible worlds. But is it adequate to do this interpretation for ordinary language? Isnt it too much to say? I say that it is inadequate, since ordinary language, as we said just a moment ago, is performed by cognitively limited speakers whose epistemic states are part of the context relevant for determining what proposition is being expressed in certain discourse. The context-independent interpretation the interpretation relative to infinite set of symmetrically reachable possible worlds is in fact interpretation of language, which

Nothing but the Truth - Vienna, 11. 3. 2012 nobody have ever spoken, because it is the interpretation of the language, which does not need pragmatic factors to determine its meaning and truth. We can claim: propositions are individuated by pragmatic presuppositions. It became usual to accept that pragmatic factors help to determine which proposition is expressed, but not to say that they somehow construct these entities, as claims Stalnaker in this long quotation crucial to make clear what position is the one I find valid: ... a remark about how semantics and pragmatics fit together. The main task of semantics is to provide rules for the determination of the propositions expressed by sentences. And propositions, I have said I will assume, are functions from possible worlds ... into truth-values. What the context provides is the domain of possible worlds that proposition distinguish between. Semantics in general gives us rules for picking a subset of possible situations from such a domain. On this kind of account, context is not just information that mediates between utterance and proposition; it is material out of which propositions are constructed. (Stalnaker, 1999, p. 156) Thus the forthcoming modification is just an extension of the notion of proposition. Def. 5.2 (Proposition): Proposition is a function from the possible worlds contained in the context into truth-values.9 What is more, this extension should be treated as a general account of proposition, because if some context is able to give us an infinite class of mutually reachable possible worlds, this case is equivalent to situation in Def. 5.1, which implicitly requires this condition to be satisfied. Richard Montague (Montague, 1970) introduces two peculiar and related notions: pragmatic language and point of reference. Pragmatic language L is simply the language which is interpreted towards some context of use. We can claim that ordinary language is of this type. The context of use Montague labels by Dana Scotts term point of reference. For example, if the only indexical features of L were the presence of tense operators and the first person 'I', then a point of reference might be an ordered

It is also just a variation on the account given in (Kripke, 1963).

Nothing but the Truth - Vienna, 11. 3. 2012 pair consisting of a person and a real number, understood respectively as the speaker and the moment of utterance. (p. 279) This we should understand as a very simple description of context of the utterance an ordered set of pragmatic indices relevant for interpretation. But it is enough for following purpose: we can see some basic context-dependence of pragmatic language. We should claim that the pragmatic language is every ordinary language, since to deny the context-dependency of natural language is to deny its most intrinsic feature. Stalnakers proposal suggests a slightly different treatment. Point of reference is defined as the amount of information conveyed by pragmatic presuppositions of the agents in discourse. Rather as an ordered set of indices we treat it as a set of propositions mutually recognized as the common ground. Even a time or a place of the utterance is the part of this information web underlying communication. However, it is doubtful if under normal conditions - there should be some agent who was unable to presuppose the right values of this features of the utterance. So all pragmatic factors should be related together in this view by means of being presupposed by members of the discourse.

5. General account of truth-determination via pragmatic presupposition

The communication starts on a given common ground composed by shared background belief about what is mutually accepted. These pragmatic presuppositions define the range of possible worlds which are reachable and thus the context set is defined. On them and only them the propositions being asserted in a course of the conversation are defined too. So some possible worlds are ruled at the beginning of conversation they are not the case. In addition, most of the utterances in the discourse trigger some other presuppositions as well. The new piece of information enters the context and changes the common ground thus the range of possible worlds on which the propositions are defined, is redefined. When the purpose of conversation is reached, there is only one alternative which is possible in respect to this purpose and agents come to the truth. There could raise other alternatives now, but each one from this moment will contain the information acquired from preceding communication. This we should take as the general account of truth-determination via pragmatic presupposition.

Appendix: Referential and attributive use of definite description

Nothing but the Truth - Vienna, 11. 3. 2012 Following section is a brief case study. Motivation to introduce it in this paper is to illustrate you the determination of truth-value via pragmatic presupposition in flagranti. I hope that they will provide some persuasive job as well. I will borrow for this purpose a famous case of Keith Donellanns account of attributive and referential use of definite description (Donellan, 1966). Robert Stalnaker adopts his solution of this puzzle in (Stalnaker, 1970) and I wish to present it as the genuine case of the phenomenon my talk discuses. What is the referential/attributive use of the definite description? Donellan explains this distinction as follows: A speaker who uses a definite description attributively in an assertion states something about whoever or whatever is the so-and-so. A speaker who uses a definite description referentially in an assertion, on the other hand, uses the description to enable his audience to pick out whom or what he is talking about and states something about that person or thing. (Donellan, 1966, p. 285) Definite description is the typical example of so called presupposition trigger a lexical item or linguistic construction which is responsible for the presupposition. (Kadmon, 2001, p. 10) That means wherever the trigger occurs, the presupposition is conveyed as well.10 Take for instance sentence (7) The man in the purple turtleneck shirt is bald. The definite description in (7) should be used both referentially and attributively. In the former, the description picks out the one and the only one individual such that is wearing the purple turtleneck. But in the case of the latter, no distinct individual is required to be picked out it is about anyone who fits the description. In stalnakerian picture, this situation is reflected in different constellations of context. Referential use of the definite description always involves a presupposition of unique salient individual which speaker intends to refer to. That means that the rule for picking up the entity about which is the description is incorporated into the common ground and thus, as we said, is indeed the part of context (Stalnaker, 1970) On the other hand, attributive use requires only the presupposition that some unspecified entity fits the description for the sake of the statement (7)
10

In context of talk about the pragmatic presupposition, it means that under normal conditions the speaker presuppose this in uttering given sentence including such a trigger.

Nothing but the Truth - Vienna, 11. 3. 2012 being either true or false. So we are still in need to find some individual, which satisfies this description, and no indices which one was meant or even if some is meant at all are provided. How it is with truth-value? Well, it depends on what is presupposed. If there is presupposed a certain referent of the description, (7) will be true if and only if this referent exists. What is the most important feature of this account, this sentence can be true even if the referent in fact does not wear that purple piece of clothes. What matters is his baldness. If there is a bald individual and it is obvious for agents that speaker would like to refer to him that means that it is presupposed who is the referent the sentence (7) is true even if the person does not fit the description. The same proposition is being asserted both if he is wearing the purple turtleneck shirt or not. But the presupposition - who is the referent - is required for making this statement true. If, on the other hand, the description is used attributively, (7) is true if the presupposition that something is wearing purple turtleneck is true. This is possible on the assumption that reference is the pragmatic phenomenon. Stalnaker says it clear enough: ... referring is something done by people with terms, and not by terms themselves. (Stalnaker, 1970) It follows from this treatment with definite descriptions that utterances involving the noun phrases are generally pragmatically ambiguous what is said by them is the matter of use, thus the matter of what is presupposed.11

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Another example of pragmatically ambiguous statement is It may be that P. It can be either the expression of modal proposition or the explicit statement that P is not presupposed.

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