Page 462 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
presuppositions were satisfied. A character in Schnitzler's Spiel im Morgengrauen implacably says to the second lieutenant, who has lost a hugeamount of money playing cards with him and does not know how to pay him back, 'Since you sat down at the card- table, you must obviously have been ready to lose.' Communicating is somehow like sitting at the card- table: presuppositions can be a bluff.
The Gricean concept of implicature can be com- pared to Austin's concept of perlocution with which it shares the feature of nonconventionality: implica- ture is an actualized perlocution. From the utterance, 'My car broke down,' one can draw a limited number of presuppositions: 'there's a car,' 'the car is the speak- er's,' 'the car was working before.' One can also draw an indefinite number of implicatures. 'Where's the nearest garage?/! can't drive you to the gym/Canyou lend me some money to have it repaired?/Bad luck haunts me,' etc.
Finally, an interesting relationship is the symbiotic one between pragmatic presuppositions and implica- tures in indirect speech acts: the presuppositions of the act (preparatory conditions in particular) are stated or questioned so as to release a (generalized con- versational) implicature.
3. Definitions
Officially at least, pragmatic presuppositions have had a short life. The available registry data on pragmatic presuppositions reveal they were born 1970 (Stal- naker) died (and celebrated with a requiem) 1977 (Karttunen and Peters). The two latter authors pro- posed to articulate the concept of presupposition into: (a) particularized conversational implicature (e.g., subjunctive conditionals); (b) generalized con- versational implicature (e.g., verbs of judgment); (c) preparatory condition on the felicity of the utterance; (d) conventional implicature (e.g., factives, even, only, but). The reader edited by Oh and Dinneen (1979) can also be seen as a post mortem commemoration.
Against the backdrop of the inadequacies of the concept of semantic presupposition, Stalnaker (1970:281) introduces the concept of pragmatic pre- supposition as one of the major factors of a context. Pragmatic presupposition, which enables him to dis- tinguish contexts from possible worlds, is defined as 'prepositional attitude.' In the same paper, Stalnaker (1970:279) adds that the best way to look at pragmatic presuppositions is as 'complex dispositions which are manifested in linguistic behavior.' Confirming the equivalence between pragmatic presupposition and prepositional attitude, Stalnaker (1973:448) defines pragmatic presupposition in the following way: 'A speaker pragmatically presupposes that B at a given moment in a conversation just in case he is disposed to act, in his linguistic behavior, as if he takes the truth of B for granted, and as if he assumes that his
audience recognizes that he is doing so.' Stalnaker's definition shows a tension between the definition of pragmatic presupposition, on the one hand as a dis- position to act, and on the other as a prepositional attitude: pragmatic terms and concepts ('disposition to act,' 'linguistic behavior') are used along with sem- antic terms and concepts ('the truth of B' in particu- lar). In Stalnaker's treatment (1970:277-81), a narrow meaning of the concept of 'pragmatic' is associated with an extended meaning of the concept of 'prop- osition,' which is the object both of illocutionary and of prepositional acts.
Keenan (1971), distinguishinga logical from a prag- matic notion, defines pragmatic presupposition as a relation between 'utterances and their contexts' (p. 51). 'An utterance of a sentence pragmatically pre- supposes that its context is appropriate' (p.49). In an almost specular opposition to Stalnaker, Keenan seems to have an extended view of pragmatics, which ends up coinciding with 'conventions of usage' as Ebert (1973:435) remarks. He also seems, at the same time, to hold a restricted view of the phenomenon 'presupposition,' as exemplified by expressions that presuppose that the speaker/hearer is a man/woman (sex and relative age of the speaker/hearer), with deic- tic particles referring to the physical setting of the utterance and with expressions indicating personal and status relations among participants (e.g., French Tu es degoutant,' lit: 'You (informal) are awful (male)').
Among other interesting definitions, is Levinson's (1983:205): 'an utterance A pragmatically presupposes a proposition B if A is appropriate only if B is mutually known by participants.'
Given (1982:100) makes the requisite of mutual knowledge more articulate: 'The speaker assumes that a proposition p isfamiliar to the hearer, likely to be believed by the hearer, accessible to the hearer, within the reach of the hearer etc. on whatever grounds.'
Some conclusions are already possible.
(a) The two definitions of presupposition as sem- antic and pragmatic (Stalnaker) or as logical and discursive (Givon) are compatible (cf. Stal-
naker 1970:279).
(b) Logical presupposition is a sub-case of dis-
cursive presupposition: 'logical presupposition is [...] the marked sub-case of discourse back- groundedness' (Givon 1984:328).
One definition occurs with particular frequency— that of presupposition as 'common ground.' The move from presupposition as prepositional attitude to pre- supposition as shared knowledge, from the world of utterances to the world 'en plein air,' is Stalnaker's (1973).
Now, both in the narrow definition (presupposition as prepositional attitude) and in the extended one (presupposition as shared belief), there is a high degree of idealization. What is common ground?
440