Presuppositions, provisos, and probability

Abstract

See, stats, and : https : / / www . researchgate . net / publication / 270135875 Presuppositions , provisos , and Article DOI : 10 . 3765 / sp . 5 . 2 CITATIONS 12 READS 58 1 : Daniel Stanford 22 SEE All . The . Abstract Theories of presupposition in the tradition associated with Kart - tunen , Stalnaker and Heim relate presupposition satisfaction to the content of conversational participants ' epistemic states , usually modeled as sets of worlds . However , converging evidence from recent work on modality and from other areas of cognitive science suggests that epistemic states are better thought of as having the richer structure of probability distribu - tions . I describe an account of semantic and pragmatic presupposition which combines core ideas from dynamic semantic treatments with a probabilistic model of information states and their dynamics in conversation , and argue that it predicts the core data of the proviso problem (Geurts 1996)withoutinvokingadhocmechanismsasconditionalstrengtheningaccountstypicallydo.Thefrequentlycitedintuitionthat(ir)relevanceiscrucialfollowswithoutstipulation,andIpresentnewcaseswhichsuggestthatirrelevanceistooweaktopredictallcasesofunconditionalpresuppositions,problematizingstrengtheningaccountswhichrelyonit.Theproposedtheoryisabletoaccountforthisnewdataandalsoforsemi-conditionalpresuppositions,astickingpointforprevioustheoriesofpresuppositionprojection.Iarguethatthisperspectivealsogivesusareasonablelineonseveralrelatedissues,includingthedivergencebetweenpresupposedconditionalsandconditionalpresuppositions,instancesoftheprovisoproblemincounterfactuals,andthecontextualvariationinthedifficultyofaccommodation.