Stalnaker(2009)_A Response to Abbott on Presupposition and Common

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Barbara Abbotts paper raises some interesting general questions about the model of

discourse that I have developed and used, but I am not persuaded that the data she

presents cast any doubt on the assumptions of that model. The examples she pre-

sents show that there are informative presuppositions, and appropriate but unin-

formative assertions, but that was never in question. Let me sketch the general

Gricean motivation for my picture of assertion and common ground, and then look

at her examples and arguments.The concept of speaker meaning was the fundamental concept of Paul Grices

account of speech, and it was his central thesis that this concept can and should be

analyzed independently of any institutional linguistic practice. He differed in this

respect both from some of the original ordinary language philosophers such as

J. L. Austin and Peter Strawson, and from some later philosophers of language such

as John Searle. The reason he insisted on this was that he wanted to give a basis for

understanding the institution of language as a device that has the function of

meaning things, and to separate an account of the functions that language was

designed to serve from an account of the means that language provides for servingthose functions. The hope was that separating means from ends would help to

clarify the specific conventional mechanisms that language provides, and the way

they interact with general principles of instrumental rationality in explaining why

people say what they say in trying to achieve their communicative ends. One

important upshot of Grices development of this program was the recognition that,

while language was a device to facilitate meaning things (for language users, the

simplest and most straightforward way to mean something is to say it), once the

device is in place, it becomes possible to use it to mean something different from

what one says. In fact, given the general features of the concept of speaker meaning(to mean something is to act with a manifest intention to affect the attitudes of ones

R. Stalnaker (&)

MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

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Linguist and Philos (2008) 31:539544

DOI 10.1007/s10988-008-9047-9

R E S E A R C H A R T I C L E

A response to Abbott on presupposition and common

ground

Robert Stalnaker

Published online: 13 January 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009


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interlocutor by the means of the recognition of that intention.), it is inevitable that

saying will in some cases diverge from Gricean speaker meaning. The relationship

between saying and meaning is a subtle and complex issue in Grices work that he

recognized was not fully resolved, but many of the general patterns of reasoning that

account for the divergence are relatively clear. They are made explicit in Griceswork on conversational implicature.

My account of assertion and common ground was guided by these Gricean ideas,

and the potential divergence, brought out by Grice, between what is said and what is

meant was a salient concern from the beginning. There is a correlative divergence

between two ways of thinking about the context in which speakers means and says

things. Any act of meaning something is performed against a background of shared

information, and this information is relevant to determining both the communicative

intentions of speakers, and the means that they can use to realize them. (One will act

to induce a belief only if the interlocutor does not already have it, and one willchoose a means that one can reasonably expect to succeed.) But asserting is saying,

rather than meaning, and has to be understood as a move in an institutional practice

of speech. Speech acts in a conventional linguistic practice also require a back-

ground context, and just as there is a meaning-saying contrast, there is a corre-

sponding potential divergence between the information actually shared by the

participants in a conversation and a body of information that is constrained by the

constitutive rules of the conventional practice, and that provides the background

against which the speech acts that are performed by the participants of that practice

are interpreted. The common ground is part of the conversational score, to useDavid Lewiss metaphor, in an game of speech. A divergence between common

ground, in this sense, and common knowledge or belief is as inevitable as the

Gricean divergence between saying and meaning, and for the same reasons. But just

as it is important for understanding a conventional communicative practice to

understand saying as the normal way of meaning something, so it is important for

understanding the role of common ground to see it as modeled on what the par-

ticipants take to be common knowledge.

The notion of presupposition accommodation was first characterized, as such, by

David Lewis, but the pattern of reasoning involved was familiar from Grices work

on conversational implicature. One presumes that speakers are speaking coopera-

tively, and infers that they have the intentions and beliefs that are necessary to make

sense of their speech acts, on this presumption. If the inference about what the

speaker intends and believes is sufficiently obvious, then it may be reasonable to

infer that the speaker intended the addressee to make this inference. Similarly, if the

presumption of cooperative speech requires that the speaker be taking something to

be common ground, and if this inference is sufficiently obvious, then it is reasonable

for the addressee to take the speaker to be taking it to be common ground, and if the

addressee is also willing to accept it, then he too will take it to be common ground,

in which case it willbe common ground. Part of my point in spelling out the iterated

structure of common belief and common ground in my paper Common Ground

was to give this pattern of reasoning a precise formulation. In some cases, such as

the sister examples, the pattern did not require any divergence between common

ground and common belief. What it did require was care in specifying the time at

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which the relevant iterated attitudes were said to hold. In a case of accommodation,

the information accommodated was obviously not common ground prior to the

speech act, since the accommodation is a response to it.

The general framework (like Grices general framework) makes no specific

empirical claims about what the expressions of any language mean, say, or pre-suppose. What it does is to provide a structure in which empirical claims about the

semantics and pragmatics of natural languages can be stated and assessed. But

Abbott thinks that the framework conflicts with empirical facts about the way

language is used. Let me respond to some of the objections:

1. Abbott (following Szabo) claims that if the time at which presupposed

information is required to be common ground is only after the speech act takes

place, then sentences such as (5) should be appropriate, even if it was not known,

prior to the speech act, that the speaker had a daughter.

(5) We all know that I have a daughter.

I agree that this statement would not be appropriate to make in this circumstance,

but why should it follow from the account that it is? I dont see why a thesis about

when presupposed material is required to be common ground has any consequences

for the interpretation of the tense in an explicit statement. Whatever one says about

presuppositions, it seems to me most natural to say that (5) is false, in the supposed

situation since it makes a claim about what was known at the time at which the

statement was made, and it is not appropriate to make manifestly false statements.But perhaps one thinks that the present tense couldbe taken to be the time at which

the statement ends. In this case, the statement is true, but the account does not imply

that it is thereby appropriate. Consider the statement: we all will know, as soon as

I finish talking, that I have a sister. This is true, but a decidedly odd thing to say,

and the oddity is not hard to explain. Why communicate the information that you

have a sister in such a strangely indirect way?

2. Abbott argues that my account of the mechanism of presupposition accom-

modation in the sister case runs the risk of doing away with the distinction

between presupposition and assertion altogether. It is right that one cannot simply

read the distinction between what is asserted and what is accommodated off of the

data, just as one cannot distinguish what is said from what is conversationally

implicated simply on the basis of what is normally communicated by some speech

act. But the general account does provide some guidance for distinguishing the

consequences of assertion from those of presupposition accommodation. One

relevant fact (as I noted in the passage that Abbott quotes) is that, in cases of

accommodation, the information that is added to the context continues to be

accepted even if the assertion itself is rejected. Even if you reject my claim that

I have to pick up my sister, you continue to accept, as common ground, that I have

a sister. A related point: in cases of presupposition accommodation the informa-

tion is communicated even when the relevant proposition is merely supposed, rather

than asserted. (When I say If I have to pick up my sister, I wont be able to come to

the meeting, you add to the common ground that I have a sister, but not that I have

to pick her up.)

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Abbott acknowledges this difference between assertion and presupposition

accommodation, but says that there is nothing in Stalnakers analysis to explain

why this is so. But the general account of assertion does explain this difference. The

assumption is that an assertion is something like a proposal to add the information

that is the content of the assertion to the common ground, and a rejection of theproposal is a normal move in the conversational game. Accommodated information

is communicated indirectly, so that there is no provision for straightforwardly

rejecting it. (One has to say something like Hey, wait a minute one of the tests

that Kai von Fintel has used to identify presupposition.) That is why accommodated

information survives rejection, and it is why it is inappropriate to communicate

information that is either controversial or noteworthy by presupposing it.

3. Abbott suggests that the sister example is a special case, and that even if we

could distinguish assertion from accommodated presupposition in that kind of case,

there are many cases where the presupposed information is not just backgroundinformation to which the speaker is presumed to have privileged access. She argues

that the distinction may be more difficult to make in the other case. She gives many

examples, and I agree that they are good examples of presupposition accommo-

dation, but I dont think they pose a problem for the account. Explanations for why

it is appropriate to communicate indirectly in this way are diverse, like the expla-

nations for conversational implicature. There are simple cases of implicature where

background information is communicated indirectly simply because it is more

efficient, and there is no point in making explicit what the hearer can figure out. (As

in Grices Im out of petrol, There is a garage around the corner case, inwhich it is implicated that the garage is open, and sells petrol). There are also cases

(like Grices famous letter of recommendation example, implicating that the can-

didate is a mediocre talent by speaking only of his handwriting and punctuality)

where the indirectness is more manifest, and the explanation proceeds by the prima

facie flouting of conversational rules. Similarly, there will be different kinds of

reasons for the fact that one chooses to communicate by presupposition accom-

modation rather than by straightforward assertion. But the facts that the phenom-

enon is pervasive, and that the explanations are diverse, are not good reasons to

object, so long as the facts can be explained.

Several of Abbotts examples are from newspaper stories. She claims that

newspaper examples are particularly problematic for the common ground view,

since written utterances that are intended for a wide audience . . . with whom the

speaker can assume only the bare minimum of shared background knowledge. But

on the contrary, I think this fact helps to explain why the rhetorical device of

communicating by presupposing is so common in this context. The news reporter

does not want either to talk down to the knowledgeable or to leave the ignorant

behind. Informatively presupposing things is a good way to have it both ways. A

similar kind of explanation applies to example (8)b: I wonder whether you realize

that Bahles is closed today. The speaker does not want to presuppose that the

addressee is unaware of this fact, but also does not want to leave her unaware, in

case she is.

Some of Abbotts other examples seem to me similar to the sister case in that

the information presupposed is easily accommodated, and it would be tedious to

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make it explicit. (e.g.: if you are going into the bedroom, would you mind bringing

backthe big bag of potato chips that I left on the bed? I could say, I left a big bag

of potato chips on the bed. If you are going into the bedroom, would you mind

bringing it back? But this seems unnecessary.) In general, Abbott makes a good

case that the phenomenon of accommodation is pervasive, but does not explain whythis should be a problem.

4. Abbott argues that the account of assertion, as well as the account of pre-

suppositon, is mistaken, since there are appropriate but uninformative assertions.

But this is a problem only if one ignores the differences between the common

ground and what is actually common knowledge or belief. Divergences need to be

explained, but they are to be expected. As with informative presupposition, there is

a diversity of cases: (i) Abbott says that examples of so-called phatic communion

(Beautiful day, isnt it! We sure need rain) are without any pretense of

being informative. But on the contrary, I think they do involve a pretense ofinformative communication, and this kind a speech would not have the functions

that it does have (e.g. establishing rapport) if it did not involve such a pretense. (ii)

A number of Abbotts examples involve ritual or explicitly institutional speech acts

(This is the dissertation defense of Susan B. Candidate.) Such examples are the

cases where it is most salient that speech is a move in a conventional institutional

game where the dynamics of actual information exchange may come apart from the

dynamics of changes in the conversational score. There is, in this kind of case,

perhaps an idealized audience (the record) that is being informed. But in any case,

I think it is not unnatural to think of this kind of practice as one that is modeled onreal communication. (iii) Some of Abbotts examples of uninformative assertions

are reminders: cases where one tells someone something that they know, but that

they may have momentarily forgotten, or that is at least not immediately available,

or salient. I dont think it is quite right to describe such cases as uninformative,

though they do bring out the complexity of the notion of informativeness.

Reminders are at least locally informative, and that is enough for them to fit the

model. (iv) Some of Abbotts examples involve what is obviously nonliteral com-

munication. One who says It goes without saying that we need to fix our cash flow

problem manifestly believes that it does not go without saying that we need to fix

our cash flow problemthat is why he said it. The person who said Linguistics is

a scienceI need hardly remind this group of that! for some reason felt a need to

remind this group that linguistics is a science. Abbott recognizes that these state-

ments involve a curious kind of contradiction. Such cases, along with the blatant

tautologies that she mentions like it is what it is and it aint over till its over

are, as Abbott acknowledges, paradigm cases of violations of maxims that require

reinterpretationjust the kind of reinterpretation that Grices maxims, and my

assumption of informativeness are used to explain. (v) Abbott notes that some

utterances are intended to focus the attention of ones address(s) on a common

ground proposition in order to set a discourse topic or otherwise manage the con-

versation. I agree with this, and it is an aspect of the dynamics of discourse that

needs more attention than it is given in my discussions of assertion. Some tautol-

ogies, for example, are not (like it is what it is) ways of implicating something

informative, but instead ways of partitioning the space to make salient a distinction

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between possibilities. So one might begin a discussion of contingency plans for

tomorrow by saying either it will be raining, or it wont be. The point is to set up

a discussion of what to do in each of the two cases. Clearly, not all speech acts are

aimed at cutting down the common ground, and one should broaden the theory to

give a systematic account of the ones that are not.Abbott says, at one point, that the model of assertion and common ground that I

present is an oversimplified picture of conversation. To echo the rat in the

cartoon reproduced in her paper, needless to say. The model is a highly idealized

framework that needs both further development, and care in its use to represent and

explain the phenomena of speech. But oversimplification is often a good place to

start, and I dont think the considerations that Abbott has raised show that the

assumptions of the model are not essentially right.

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