Schlenker, Philippe. 2012. "Maximize Presupposition and Gricean
Reasoning". Accepted for publication with minor revisions in Natural Language Semantics.
[Full paper in
pdf]
Abstract:
Recent semantic research has made increasing use of a principle, Maximize Presupposition, which
requires that under certain circumstances the strongest possible
presupposition be marked. This principle is generally taken to be
irreducible to standard Gricean reasoning because the forms that are in
competition have the same assertive content. We suggest, however,
that Maximize Presupposition
might be reducible to the theory of scalar implicatures. (i) First, we
consider a special case: the speaker utters a sentence with a
presupposition p which is not initially taken for granted by the
addressee, but the latter takes the speaker to be an authority on the
matter. Marking the presupposition provides new information to the
addressee; but it also follows from the logic of presupposition qua common belief that the
presupposition is thereby satisfied (Stalnaker 2002). (ii) Second, we
generalize this solution to other cases. We assume that even when p is
common belief, there is a very small chance that the addressee might
forget it ('Fallibility'); in such cases, marking a presupposition will
turn out to generate new information by re-establishing part of the
original context. We also adopt from Singh (2011) the hypothesis that
presupposition maximization is computed relative to local contexts -
and we assume that these too are subject to Fallibility; this accounts
for cases in which the information that justifies the presupposition is
linguistically provided. (iii) Finally, we suggest that our assumptions
have benefits in the domain of implicatures: they make it possible to
reinterpret Magri's 'blind' (i.e. context-insensitive) implicatures as
context-sensitive implicatures which just happen to be misleading.