Professor Sandy Goldberg Northwestern University

Event details

Permissible Presupposition: a case for Mutualism in the Theory of Language and Communication

When it is proper or acceptable for a speaker to presuppose that p in the course of a conversation?  Taking Stalnaker’s Common Ground model as my background, I argue (1) that this question is best framed as a question regarding the conversational permissibility of the speaker’s presupposition, (2) that while Stalnaker (2002) himself appears sensitive to the need to address this question, he actually addresses a different question there (one regarding reasonable speaker presupposition), and that (3) we should reject the thesis that a speaker’s presupposition is conversationally permissible iff it is reasonable in the sense Stalnaker articulates.  The reason is that, while Stalnaker’s account of reasonable presupposition is framed exclusively from within the speaker’s perspective (as is befitting the question he is asking), the conditions on permissible presupposition transcend the speaker’s perspective.  I argue that this requires us to embrace a mutualist framework, where what fixes the permissibility of a speaker’s presupposition is what is mutually conversationally salient to all participants, and where this can in principle outstrip what the any one of the participants reasonably regards as mutually salient.  I conclude by pointing to constraints on developing this sort of picture further. 

This is a Philosophy Colloquium Event.