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Mandy Simons Department of Philosophy Carnegie Mellon University April 21, 2005 Thursday, 4:00pm-6:00pm BA (Close/Hipp), Room 008 In this talk, I will offer a novel account of the nature of presupposition. I will propose that presuppositions are properties, not of sentences, nor of speakers, but of utterances. Specifically, the presuppositions of an utterance are propositions which are required -- in a sense to be specified -- in order for the utterance to make sense to the addressee. I will spell out the notion of making sense in Gricean terms: an utterance makes sense to an interpreter just in case she can assign to it some interpretation which allows her to attribute full cooperativity to the speaker. The next step will be to articulate what it is for a proposition to be required in order to allow an interpreter to make sense of an utterance. I will argue that the relevant requirement concerns a somewhat complex relation which must hold between the proposition in question and the interpreter. Having laid out the view of presupposition, I will show that many of the standard properties of presupposition are natural explicable in terms of the account, including the fact that presuppositions must generally be noncontroversial for the conversational participants.  |
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