Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Providing a proper characterization of what presuppositions are should help elucidate the nature of meaning and of the different levels, aspects or kinds of meaning (asserted meaning, literal meaning, character, content, conversational implicatures, explicatures, presuppositions, conventional implicatures, expressive meaning, etc.). There is a promising view of presuppositions which treats them as semantic entailments, and which models them using partial meaning functions. This promising view is challenged by the view put forward by those authors (for instance Soames(1989), Green(2000) and Potts(2004)) that argue that presuppositions (like conversational implicatures) are cancellable. I will argue that the data that has been used to argue for this view can be more appropriately accounted for assuming the semantic view of presuppositions. I will argue, therefore, that we have no good reason to abandon the simpler, clear, promising semantic view according to which presuppositions are not (in the relevant sense) cancellable.