Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

On the Availability of Presuppositions in Conversation

Date: 28 April 2017

Time: 11:00

Place: Room 4047 (former Logic Seminar Room)

Abstract

Presupppositions – information speakers mutually take for granted in conversation – play important explanatory roles in pragmatics and semantics. In this talk, I argue that not all presuppositions in a conversation are equally available, or accessible, to speakers at a given stage in conversation. That is, at a given point in conversation, some pieces of information are clearly presupposed, yet they aren’t available to speakers for linguistic actions. Standard conceptions of the conversation’s common ground–the set of presuppositions–cannot account for such differences in availability. I present a model of common ground that makes room for a notion of availability of presuppositions relative to a linguistic task. The model draws on three independent ideas: (a) the notion of context as common ground, (2) mental fragmentation (as in Lewis, Stalnaker, Cherniak), and Question-Under-Discussion models of discourse (e.g. Roberts 2012).