-1- Foundational Issues in Presupposition

This essay provides a brief introduction to the topic of presupposition, and then discuses three major approaches to this phenomenon, focusing on the answers which each approach gives to two foundational questions: What is presupposition? And how, or why, does it arise? 1. The phenomenon Consider sentence (1): (1) Jane has stopped drinking coffee in the evening. Among other things, this sentence entails: (2) Jane has stopped drinking coffee after 10pm. Unsurprisingly, the negation of sentence (1), shown in (3), does not share this entailment. Neither does the yes/no question formed from this sentence. Similarly, if we add a possibility modal to the sentence, or construct a conditional of which (1) is the antecedent, the resulting sentences do not share the entailment of the original, as we see from the examples below: (3) Jane hasn't stopped drinking coffee in the evening. (4) Has Jane stopped drinking coffee in the evening? (5) Jane might've stopped drinking coffee in the evening. (6) If Jane has stopped drinking coffee in the evening, she is probably sleeping better. In other words, sentences (3)-(6) illustrate entailment-cancelling embeddings of sentence (1). Now consider another entailment of our original sentence (1): (7) Jane used to drink coffee in the evening. A speaker who utters any of the sentences in (3)-(6), sentences which are not expected to preserve any of the entailments of (1), remains committed to the truth of the proposition in (7). This proposition, entailed by (1) and implied in some sense by the related sentences (3)-(6), is considered a presupposition of all of them. What does it mean to say that these propositions are presuppositions? That is the central question in the study of this topic. A significant literature on presupposition exists in both linguistics and philosophy. Yet, as Kripke (1990) observes: " to some degree Justice Stewart's comment about pornography holds here: we all recognize it [the presupposition relation] when we see it [but] we can't say exactly what it is " (p.1).