Towards a presuppositionless pragmatics

From M. Simons, "Presupposing"

"After, [Frege, Strawson, and (of all people)] Austin, the next major step in pragmatic theory was Grice’s introduction of conversational
implicature (Grice 1967)."

"Grice proposes that [pirots] share a standing presumption that
utterances will be made in accord with a variety of norms: norms that determine what counts as a reasonable,
appropriate conversational contribution."

"In order for an interpreter to see an utterance as being in accord with
these norms, it is sometimes necessary for her to attribute certain presumptions to the speaker."

"This step in
interpretation seems a natural place to locate the kinds of pragmatic implications which, in the
Frege/Strawson view, constitute presuppositions."

"A number of authors have argued for conversational-inference accounts of presupposition, or of certain
cases of presupposition, including Atlas (1977 and elsewhere), Kempson (1975), Wilson (1975), Boër &
Lycan (1976), Karttunen & Peters (1979), Atlas & Levinson (1981), Kadmon (2001), Simons (2004, 2009)."

"Grice himself (1981) offers a conversational implicature account of the presuppositions associated with
definite descriptions."

"Of these authors, some argue that all cases of presupposition can be reduced to
conversational implicature, while others target specific cases. Similarly, some authors argue that the notion
of presupposition can be eliminated entirely, as theoretically spurious, while others see themselves simply
as providing an account of how a certain special class of pragmatic implication arises."

"Conversational-inference based ... accounts fall into two broad classes. In one
class of accounts, presuppositions are analyzed along the lines suggested by the discussion so far, as
propositions which the speaker can be inferred to believe."

"Such accounts all share the same basic structure.
In the case of presuppositions which are (also) entailments, as with the affirmative versions of examples (1)-
(3) above, no account is needed of why the implication arises: it is simply an entailment."

"A neo-Gricean
account for these cases uses general principles of conversation to explain why, when the sentence is uttered,
this particular entailment would be understood as backgrounded, and not part of the main point of the
utterance."

"For cases where the observed presupposition is not an entailment, as for example with the
negations of these examples, these accounts aim to explain, in the same terms, why utterance of the sentence
is in accord with general conversational principles only if the speaker is taken to believe the relevant
proposition."

"In these accounts, presuppositions are not clearly distinguished from any other conversational
implicature."

"Intuitively, it is natural to classify presuppositions as background implicatures (Thomason 1990, Simons
2009) as opposed to foreground implicatures. They can be distinguished in terms of the speaker’s
communicative intention: foreground implicatures are part of what the speaker means, in Grice’s sense of
this term, while background implicatures are not."

"However, there is as yet no clear way to make this
distinction without relying on intuition about what is meant.
Grice’s own account of the presuppositions of definites (Grice 1981) makes a clearer distinction between
ordinary implicatures and presuppositions: the latter are cases where conversational principles lead to the
conclusion that the speaker is treating the relevant proposition as common ground. (See also Kadmon 2001)"

"This type of account provides a way of explaining the intuition that to utter a sentence with presupposition
p is to act as if p is already established among the interlocutors."

"There is a class of presuppositions which seems amenable to analysis only by some type of neo-Gricean
account."

"Here is an example of a case. Suppose at the beginning of a meeting which I am chairing, I look at
my watch and say in an attention-getting tone

“OK, it’s 3 o’clock.”

The relevance of my remark presumably
derives from the fact that the meeting is supposed to start at 3:00, and my remark is a way of letting everyone
know that it’s time to start."

"In the right circumstances (say, you don’t know anything about this meeting but
happen to be in the meeting room talking to a colleague), you could probably infer that my utterance requires
this presupposition for its relevance."

"And if in fact my presupposition was incorrect (perhaps I had forgotten
that we had agreed to start the meeting at 3:15), the most reasonable response would be to correct the
mistaken presupposition, just as in the case of standard presuppositions."

"These cases of contextual
presupposition are not triggered by any expression in the sentence used, but arise by virtue of the use made
of the sentence in the particular conversational context."

"On the other hand, neo-Gricean accounts seem to have no traction in cases where presuppositionality is
apparently linguistically encoded. Consider, for example, the case of clefts (example (3) above). On standard
views, (3) expresses just the same proposition as its non-cleft variant, President Obama is in Afghanistan."

"So in this case, it is rather natural to assume that the presupposition is conventionally encoded in the cleft
form.2 But if presuppositions are sometimes conventional, then the notion of pragmatic implication cannot
provide a fully general account of presupposition."