Abstract: In the last thirty years,
the problem of presupposition projection has been taken to provide a
decisive argument for a dynamic approach to meaning, one in which
expressions are not evaluated with respect to the ‘global’ context of
utterance, but rather with respect to a ‘local context’ obtained by
updating the global one with expressions that occur earlier in the
sentence. The computation of local contexts is taken by dynamic
analyses to follow from a generalization of the notion of belief
update. We argue that the dynamic approach is faced with a dilemma: in
its pragmatic incarnation (Stalnaker), it is explanatory but not
general; in its semantic incarnation (Karttunen and Heim), it is
general but not explanatory. We suggest that the dilemma stems for a
faulty understanding of ‘local contexts’, and we offer a new
reconstruction of this notion which eschews belief update but offers a
general and fully precise solution to the projection problem.