milton friedman’s seminal article, “methodology of positive economics”, is one of the most important and contentious works ever been discussed within the realm of economic methodology. in this article, on the basis of an instrumentalist approach to the nature of theorizing, friedman declares the tenets of positive economics, and in this vein, he professes his disputable doctrine about “unrealis...

We investigate the semantic effects of focus in complement clauses of various kinds of complement-taking predicates and argue that the empirically attested readings are predicted by the interplay of two principles: (i) embedded focus locally triggers the presupposition that the existential closure of the background is true, (ii) embedding predicates differ in their presupposition projection pro...

In this paper I will give a modal two-dimensional analysis of presupposition and modal subordination. I will think of presupposition as a non-veridical propositional attitude. This allows me to evaluate what is presupposed and what is asserted at different dimensions without getting into the binding problem. What is presupposed will be represented by an accessibility relation between possible w...

The chief characteristic of presuppositions is that they tend to take wide scope, yet most theories of presupposition, the author's not excepted, fail to provide an explanation of this fact. Recently, however, it has been suggested that a principled explanation can be given in terms of informativeness: the idea is that presuppositions simply prefer stronger readings to weaker ones. This proposa...