Page 463 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

What is shared knowledge? Is there a different 'com- mon ground' for different communities of speakers? And to what extent, and on the basis of what kind of conjecture, can one speak, even within the same community, of 'common ground'? Stalnaker (1974: 201) realizes the Platonic flavor of this notion when he gives examples of asymmetry in 'shared knowledge' (a conversation with the barber). The definition of presupposition in terms of common knowledge works '[i]n normal, straightforward serious conversational contexts where the overriding purpose of the con- versation is to exchange information [...] The diffi- culties [...] come with contexts in which other interests besides communication are being served by the con- versation.' But what are the criteria that define a con- versation as 'normal,' 'straightforward,' and 'serious' ? Further, are there no other interests beyond that of exchanging information that come into play in every conversation?
Finally, it is worth stressing that the concept of 'common ground' is effective only as a dejure concept, not as a de re concept, i.e., not as something onto- logically stated, but as something deontically given by the speaker (Ducrot 1972), a frame of reference with which the hearer is expected to comply. On the one hand, a field of anthropological, sociological, and rhe- torical investigation opens up. On the other, the characterization of presupposition as shared knowl- edge risks being static and idealizing, and contains a high amount of ideological birdlime.
4. Pragmatic Presuppositions as Felicity Conditions
At this point, a few other remarks are in order. First of all, the classic presuppositional model is semantic; even when a notion of pragmatic presupposition is invoked, an analysis of a semantic phenomenon is in fact presented. Pragmatic notions such as that of 'utterance' or 'context' are invoked with the main aim of avoiding the contradictions of semantic models. The most refined treatment of pragmatic presup- position, Gazdar (1979), does not escape this restric- tion.
Second, an assertive model is involved in the differ- ent definitions of pragmatic presupposition. A point of view centered on truth value is lurking behind alleged pragmatic presuppositions: the concept of proposition (content of an assertion, be it true or false), is the relevant theoretical unit. But can this theoretical construct work as the pragmatic unit of measure? Is it adequate to describe communicative behavior? Nothing seems to escape the tyranny of propositions, from the content of the actual utterance to a mental content (which, if not in propositional form, becomes so after being embedded in a predicate like 'know' or 'believe'), to a common or shared knowledge, to the representation that a logician or a philosopher gives of that content. To what extent is
the concept of proposition adequate? Pragmatic pre- suppositions not only concern knowledge, whether true or false: they concern expectations, desires, inter- ests, claims, attitudes toward the world, fears, etc. The exclusive use of the concept of proposition is idealizing and in the long run misleading,especiallywhenitgives rise to the restoration of the dimension truth/ falsehood as the only dimension of assessment of an utterance, whereas it is only one among the many possible ones.
The pragmatic level is not homogeneous with respect to the other levelsof linguisticdescription, i.e., to the syntactic or the semantic one; it triggers other questions and anxieties. Pragmatic presuppositions are not a necessary condition on the truth or the falsehood of an utterance; rather, they are necessary to the felicity of an act.
Once the logical semantic level of analysis has been abandoned, once it has been decided to consider the data of the real communication as relevant, the fact that Oedipus has killed his father is—prior to being an entailment or a presupposition of'Oedipus regrets having killed hisfather'—knowledge common to a cul- ture. 'Perched over the pragmatic abyss' (Givon 1982: 111), one feels giddy. Pragmatic presupposition can actually be God, or the autonomy of cats (if one excepts the logicians' cats, which, as is well known, invariably remain on their mats). The notion of pre- supposition is then drawn out so much as to run the risk of being useless. There is, though, a narrower and more technical meaning of pragmatic presupposition which is helpful in building up a protective wall at the edge of the abyss: it is that of pragmatic pre- suppositions as the felicity conditions of an illo- cutionary act.
Assume that the relevant unit to the concept of pragmatic presupposition is not the utterance, but the speech act. Pragmatic presuppositions can be regarded as felicity conditions or, according to Sear- le's model, as constitutive rules of conventional acts (e.g., promises, requests, assertions, etc.). If a pre- supposition functioning as a felicity condition of the act does not hold, the act fails. Note, incidentally, that a presupposition failure has different consequences, compared to the failure of an implicature: in fact, the failure of the latter has no bearing on the success of the illocutionary act.
The identification of presuppositions with felicity conditions is not a new idea: 'By the presuppositional aspect of a speech communication,' argues Fillmore (1971:276), 'I mean those conditions which must be satisfied in order for a particular illocutionary act to be effectively performed in saying particular sentences. Of course, we need not be concerned with the totality of such conditions, but only with those that can be related to facts about the linguistic structure of sentences.' This definition can be shared to the extent that it draws attention to researching systematic
Presupposition, Pragmatic
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