Page 1Page 2Page 3Page 4Page 5Page 6Page 7Page 8Page 9Page 10Page 11Page 12Page 13Page 14Page 15Page 16Page 17Page 18Page 19Page 20Page 21Page 22Page 23*. A version of this paper was read at the University of Cincinnati Philosophy Colloquium inNovember 2001. I would like to thank the participants of the colloquium, in particular Chris Gauker,Mitch Green, Michael Glanzburg, Jeff King, Jason Stanley, and Zoltan Gendler-Szábó for theircomments and suggestions, which have led, I hope, to an improved version of the paper. I amparticularly indebted to Jeff King for clarifying for me the importance of the notion of defectivecontexts for this discussion. None of those named are in any way responsible for the views articulatedhere. I would also like to thank the participants in my seminar on presupposition, who kept mecompany while I worked out these ideas.-1-Presupposition and Accommodation: Understanding theStalnakerian picture*Mandy SimonsCarnegie Mellon UniversityApril 2002AbstractThis paper offers a critical analysis of Stalnaker’s work on presupposition(Stalnaker 1973, 1974, 1979, 1999 and forthcoming). The paper examinestwo definitions of speaker presupposition offered by Stalnaker—thefamiliar common ground view, and the earlier, less familiar dispositionalaccount of this notion—and how Stalnaker relates this notion to thelinguistic phenomenon of presupposition. Special attention is paid toStalnaker’s view of accommodation, the process invoked to deal withmismatches between the presuppositions of different speakers and also withcases of informative presupposition. It is argued here that given Stalnaker’sviews, accommodation is not rightly seen as driven by the presuppositionalrequirements of utterances, but only by the interests of speakers ineliminating perceived differences among presuppositions. I also considerthe revisions which are needed either to the definition of speakerpresupposition or of sentence presupposition in light of the possibility ofinformative presupposition. In the concluding section, I discuss the waysin which some recent accounts of context and speaker presuppositiondepart from their Stalnakerian foundations.0. IntroductionThe goal of this paper is to try to get clear on the details of the Stalnakerian view ofspeaker presupposition, to clarify how this notion is related by Stalnaker to thelinguistic phenomenon of presupposition, and to examine Stalnaker’s view of thenature and role of accommodation. The outlines of the Stalnakerian picture arefamiliar. Presupposition is primarily a property of speakers, not of sentences. Aspeaker’s presuppositions are, roughly, those propositions which she believes toconstitute the accepted background information for the conversation in which she isengaged. Presupposition as a property of sentences is a secondary notion: To say that-2-a sentence has a presupposition p is to say — again, roughly — that the use of thatsentence is normally appropriate only if the speaker’s presuppositions entails p.But this is just the rough and ready version of Stalnaker’s view. In fact, thedefinition of speaker presupposition has undergone a number of revisions in thecourse of his work, and the relation between speaker and sentence presupposition isnot straightforward. This simplified version of the view is, though, the one which hasmade its way into the recent literature on presupposition which has grown out ofStalnaker’s work. My goal here is to provide an exegetic overview of theStalnakerian foundations of this literature.My discussion will be focused around one particular complication with which theStalnakerian view has contended from the first. This is the well known fact that aspeaker need not actually believe that the presuppositions of the sentences she uttersare part of the accepted background information at the time of utterance. Speakerscan, under certain circumstances, use presupposing sentences to inform their hearersthat the presuppositions are true (or at least, that they believe so, or intend theirhearers to believe so). These cases of informative presupposition seem to be in directconflict with the claim just made, that appropriate utterance of a presupposingsentence requires that the presupposition be entailed by the speaker’spresuppositions.Stalnaker himself has been well aware of this complication throughout. He raisesthe issue in his very first paper on presupposition (Presuppositions, 1973). There, andin subsequent papers, he suggests that informative presuppositions involve a type ofGricean exploitation of an established conversational requirement. Currently, he andothers treat informative presupposition using Lewis’s (1979) notion ofaccommodation, a process whereby the relevant aspect of the conversational recordadjusts to satisfy the requirements of an incoming utterance. (Presumably,accommodation is to have Gricean underpinnings, to be justifiable in terms ofgeneral conversational principles.) But Stalnaker’s understanding of accommodationdeparts from Lewis’s original conception, and from the version of this notionassumed in recent dynamic semantic treatments of presupposition. In what follows,I will try to spell out how, in Stalnaker’s view, speaker presupposition, sentencepresupposition and accommodation are supposed to interrelate, and how this viewdiffers from other conceptions.In my discussion, I will frequently invoke definitions of sentence presupposition.This requires some justification, as Stalnaker himself has been leery of defining anysuch notion directly. Presupposition (1973) is the only place in which he does so. InPragmatic Presuppositions (1974), Stalnaker declines to commit to any definition.He writes:It is true that the linguistic facts to be explained by a theory of presupposition arefor the most part relations between linguistic items, or between a linguisticexpression and a proposition . . . But I think all the facts can be stated and explaineddirectly in terms of the underlying notion of speaker presupposition, and without1.A note on citations: The papers Pragmatic Presuppositions and Assertion have been reprinted in the1999 collection, Context and Content. Where I cite those papers, I give page numbers from theoriginal publications, followed by page numbers from the reprint.2. Although Stalnaker objects here to characterizing sentence presupposition on the grounds that thenotion is purely descriptive, he also asserts in Common Ground that his arguments