Contexts and Propositions

This paper concerns itself with the relation between two important semantic notions: the traditional notion of proposition and a more recent notion of context as an information state. The notion of proposition has traditionally played an important role in the theory of meaning: propositions are entities that have independent truth conditions and act as the meaning of both independent and embedded sentences as well the objects of propositional attitudes such as assertion and belief. The notion of context is important in the semantics of natural languages for obvious reasons since many expressions depend on features of the utterance situation or the relevant stage of the discourse for their evaluation. Two seemingly quite different notions of context, though, have come to play a role in semantic analysis only one of which will be of concern in this paper. One notion is that of an utterance context, a context whose features include the time of the utterance, the speaker, and the speaker's intentions as to what he is referring to with the utterance of particular expressions. The other notion of context which is the one relevant for this paper represents the content of the presuppositions made at the relevant stage of the discourse. Such a presuppositional context systematically changes with an increase of information in the discourse both during the utterance of a sequence of sentences and the utterance of certain complex sentences with conjunctions, conditionals, or quantifiers. A presuppositional context figures in recent semantic analyses of various phenomena: it has been taken to determine the acceptability of sentences with presuppositions, as providing information about the evaluation of unbound anaphoric pronouns, and as providing the basis of evaluation of epistemic modals and indicative conditionals. Theories making use of a presuppositional context generally assign it a central role for the meaning of a sentence. There are two views regarding the relation between a presuppositional context and sentence meaning. On one view, a presuppositional context is taken to be meaning-determining, determining whether a sentence expresses a proposition and if so which proposition it expresses. On another, more recent, dynamic view, meaning is taken to be context-determining, the meaning of a sentence itself being 2 identified with its potential of changing one context to another. I will argue that presuppositional context is neither meaning-determining nor are there any semantic operations on meaning. Rather the content of a sentence is independent of any presuppositional context. The …