In my talk, I want to tackle the idea of lying with presupposition from a previously unexplored angle. The idea that one can lie with presuppositions is best spelled out in Viebahn 2020. There, he proposes a commitement-based view of lying, contrasted to saying-based definitions of lying (see eg. Stokke 2018, Saul 2012). According to Viebahn, a lie occurs when the content of a communicative act performed is the proposition p, the person performing this act commits herself to p and believes it to be false. Such definition of lying makes no reference to the concept of assertion, encompassing the cases where one lies with presupposition.

However, as it was pointed out by Gaszczyk (2023), Viebahn does not want to abandon the traditional definition of lying — he emphasises that in all the cases analysed by him in his paper the communicative act performed by the speaker is asserting, and goes as far as to claim that the committal communicative act in his definition can be understood as asserting. This is a consequence that Gaszczyk disagrees with and finds unnecessarily conservative, as well as damaging to the distinction between assertion and presupposition. What Gaszczyk proposes is to get rid of Viebahn’s claim that uninformative presuppositions cannot fulfil his definition of lying (because one cannot commit to something that is already in the common ground) and suggests that it is indeed possible to lie with uninformative presuppositions. While I agree with Gaszczyk with regards to his criticism of Viebahn’s commitment to equating lying with assertion, I think his claim that one can lie with uninformative presuppositions is unsubstantiated and counterintuitive.

In my talk, I want to propose an approach that allows one to get rid of the idea that it is only possible to lie using assertions (even if the lie is due to a presupposition present in a given assertion) without committing oneself to the counterintuitive consequence that it is possible to lie with uninformative presuppositions. This approach is based on the idea that presuppositions should be treated as anaphors, albeit having more descriptive content (Van der Sandt 1992). This difference allows them to establish the discourse referent if there isn’t one already present in the common ground. If there is one, presuppositions act just like anaphors — they get their content from the information previously established in the discourse. While Van der Sandt’s goal was to explain presupposition projection as anaphora resolution, his idea can be used to explain why it is possible to lie with informative presuppositions, and not with uninformative presuppositions, without appealing to the notion of assertion. In the approach I propose this is explained by appealing to the anaphoric and descriptive properties of presuppositions. If the presupposition is considered informative, it means that there has not been enough information in the common ground, and this is where its descriptive content comes into play — it creates an antecedent for it in the common ground. If the proposition is uninformative, its antecedent is already represented in the common ground, and therefore the speaker’s commitment to it is minimised. Such approach gets rid of the problematic qualities of both Viebahn’s and Gaszczyk’s accounts, while preserving their good parts — relying on commitment and allowing for lying with presuppositions even in conversational acts that are not assertions, such as questions.

The plan of the talk is the following: I start with a brief overview of Viebahn’s account, as well as Gaszczyk’s critique of it, working on examples from their papers. Then, I give an overview of Van der Sandt idea that presuppositions are anaphors, focusing on the question of how it would work in the case of uninformative presuppositions. Finally, coming back to Viebahn and Gaszczyk, I show how the problems in their accounts can be resolved using Van der Sandt idea.

References:

Gaszczyk, G. (2022). Lying with uninformative speech acts. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 52(7), 746-760.

Saul, J. M. 2012: Lying, Misleading, & What is Said. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stokke, Andreas. 2018. Lying and Insincerity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Van der Sandt, R. A. (1992). Presupposition projection as anaphora resolution. Journal of semantics, 9(4), 333-377.

Viebahn, Emanuel. 2020. “Lying with Presuppositions.” Noûs 54 (3): 731–51.

It is common to find in the literature on presuppositions a discussion of the so-called “Frege-Strawson” approach, either specifically in relation to singular terms such as definite descriptions or in general with respect to the phenomenon of presupposition as such (e.g., Kaplan 1970: 279; Kripke 1977: 269; Garcia-Carpintero 2000: 13; Salmon 2007: 69; Pelletier & Linsky 2005: 203; Elbourne 2013: 2; Schoubye 2013; Beaver, Geurts & Denlinger 2021: §2). For instance, Elbourne (2013: 2) writes that “the Frege–Strawson theory” is the theory according to which “definite descriptions are basically referential and introduce a presupposition to the effect that there is a unique entity that satisfies the nominal descriptive content” (2013: 2). I wish to argue that the differences between the Fregean and the Strawsonian accounts are sufficiently important so as to motivate a separate treatment of them. Scholars have pointed out that the two approaches are different, and that both of them are somewhat underdetermined with respect to distinctions that are now commonplace in natural language semantics and pragmatics (see, more recently, the discussion in Sander 2021). But the main difference seems to me to be the following. What is standardly called the “Frege-Strawson theory” places presuppositions at the level of what Kaplan (1989) calls character. This is somewhat fare to Strawson’s own approach, if we interpret it as a semantic proposal. Strawson’s notion of conventional meaning is close to Kaplan’s (1989) notion of character. According to Strawson (1950: 327), to talk about the meaning of an expression or sentence is to talk about the conventions governing its correct use. And Kaplan (1989: 520-524) characterizes character as a property of only to words and phrases as types, to which it is directly associated by convention. However, Frege’s notion of sense is closer to Kaplan’s (1989) notion of content, rather than to that of character. Kaplan observes that (1989: 502) his notion of content in inspired by Carnap’s (1947) notion of intension, and this, in turn, is inspired by Frege’s notion of sense. A presuppositional expression such as a proper name is for Frege simply an expression that has a sense, but the sense does not always determine a reference. However, as several authors have pointed out, Frege does not have a notion corresponding to the Kaplanian character, or conventional meaning (Burge 1990: 244; Heck 2002: 7; Perry 1977: 9). That is why I find it inadequate to talk about the “Frege-Strawson theory of presuppositions”.

In the second part of the paper, I consider the question whether the difference between the two approaches, the Fregean and the Strawsonian, has some bearing on the way in which presuppositions are represented in truth-conditional semantics. I look into the possibility of capturing this difference in the standard formal framework for truth-conditional semantics developed in Heim and Kratzer (1998), for extensional contexts, and Fintel and Heim (2011), for intensional contexts. The latter framework allows to draw the Kaplanian distinction between character and content. I take the presuppositions of definite descriptions as a case study. In Heim and Kratzer (1998: 80) formulate presuppositions as partial functions. On my interpretation, a Fregean account of presuppositions treats the intension of an expression which carries a presupposition as a partial function. On a Strawsonian account, the character of an expression which carries a presupposition is a partial function from contexts to intensions. I compare the predictions that the two theories for the analysis of sentences that contain DDs embedded in intensional contexts. I focus on the analysis of the de dicto readings of non-doxastic propositional attitudes ascriptions.

References

Beaver, D. I. and Geurts, B., Denlinger (2021) “Presupposition”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Burge, Tyler (1990) ‘‘Frege on Sense and Linguistic Meaning’’, in D. Bell and N. Cooper (eds.), The Analytic Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell), 30–60.

Carnap, R. (1947) Meaning and Necessity: a Study in Semantics and Modal Logic. University of Chicago Press.

Elbourne, P. (2005) Situations and Individuals, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Elbourne, P. (2013) Definite Descriptions, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Frege, G. (1892) “Uber Sinn und Bedeutung”, Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, C, 25–50. English Translation: “On Sense and Meaning”, in B. McGuinness (ed.), Frege: collected works, Oxford: Blackwell, 157–177.

Fintel, K. von and Heim, I. (2011) Intensional Semantics, retrieved from

http://web.mit.edu/fintel/fintel-heim-intensional.pdf.

García-Carpintero, M. (2000) “A presuppositional account of reference fixing”. Journal of Philosophy 97 (3):109-147.

Heck, Richard (2002). “Do demonstratives have senses?” Philosophers' Imprint 2 (2): 1-33.

Heim, I. and Kratzer, A. (1998) Semantics in Generative Grammar, Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics, Oxford: Blackwell.

Kaplan, D. (1970) “What is Russell’s Theory of Descriptions?”, in W. Yourgrau and A. D. Breck (eds.), Physics, Logic, and History, Routledge, 277-295.

Kaplan, D. (1989) “Demonstratives – An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics, and Epistemology of Demonstratives and Other Indexicals”, in J. Almog, J. Perry and H. K. Wettstein (eds.): Themes from Kaplan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 524–526.

Kripke, S. (1977) “Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 2, 255–276.

Pelletier, F.J. and Linsky, B. (2005) “What is Frege's Theory of Descriptions?” in B. Linsky & G. Imaguire (eds.) On Denoting: 1905-2005, Philosophia Verlag, 195-250.

Perry, John (1977) “Frege on Demonstratives”, The Philosophical Review 86, no. 4: 474-97.

Sander, T. (2021). Understanding Frege’s notion of presupposition. Synthese, 199 (5-6), 12603-12624.

Salmon, N. (2007). “About Aboutness”. European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 3 (2):59-76.

Schoubye, A. (2013) “Ghosts, Murderers, and the Semantics of Descriptions”, Noûs 47(3), 496-533.

Strawson, P. F. (1950) “On Referring”, Mind, 59, 320–344.

Empty definite descriptions have posed a challenge for any philosopher who engaged with Russell’s seminal “On Denoting”. Russell held the view that sentences containing them are always false, while Strawson argued that such sentences have no truth-value at all, for a presupposition failure occurs. However, he added, the observation that a statement like “The present King of France is bald” is truth-valueless is based on intuition (cfr., Strawson 1950, 1964). This situation serves as a starting point for engaging with the issue with the help of experimental linguistics.

A test on definite descriptions has been already carried out a decade ago by Márta Abrusán and Kriszta Szendröi; the purpose of their experiment was to “investigate the truth value intuitions reported in the literature” (Abrusán and Szendröi 2013, p. 2) of empty definite descriptions. The experimenters have analyzed how - and if - some pragmatic factors influence speakers’ truth-value judgments about such sentences: these factors are the presence of a background knowledge (Lasersohn 1993), verifiability (Von Fintel 2004), and topicality (Strawson 1964). Their result is that “verifiability seems to be the determining factor in native speakers’ judgments of sentences involving reference failure of noun phrases. Topicality is parasitic on that.” (ibidem, p.35).

However, the test carried out by the authors presents some serious flaws:

• The total number of conditions in this experiment is 11, each consisting in 8 critical items (8 sentences containing empty descriptions), alongside twice as many fillers. This amounts to a rough total number of 250 sentences, administered to 33 participants. This disproportion is statistically and methodologically troublesome.
• Strawson’s topicality has been triggered by employing left dislocated structures, i.e., constructions like “The King of France, he was invited to have dinner with Sarkozy”. If the effects observed are due to the topical status of the definite description, the same effects should be obtained in other topical constructions like clefts.
• Employing a ternary judgment task (the participant had to choose among TRUE, FALSE, CAN’T SAY) is debatable. Apart from considerations about the lexical meaning of the label the authors have decided to use, asking directly to participants to adjudicate between three values means that they are made aware of the fact that there is, indeed, a third value to begin with, that may be ascribed; the distinction between falsity (FALSE) and presupposition failure (CAN’T SAY) could be, in fact, not available for non-experts.

Therefore, I carried out an experiment so to amend the three points I have mentioned above. In a within-subject design, 68 participants, divided into two sets, had to perform a rating task: they had to rate, on a Likert scale from 1 to 7 (1 being “False” and 7 being “True”), how much they were inclined to ascribe truth to the sentences they were reading. I have compared two Strawson’s conditions: a presuppositional condition (e.g., “The King of France is bald” vs. “France has a King, and he is bald”) and a topicality condition (e.g., “It is the King of France who called Macron last night” vs. “It is Macron who called the King of France last night”). Each set consisted in a number of 66 items in a semi-randomized order.

With respect to the presuppositional condition, cross-analysis on the results shows that, when the existential presupposition is made explicit, speakers tend to evaluate the sentences more falsely than cases in which existence is presupposed (71,43% vs. 57,58%). I believe that these results are consistent with Strawson’s hypothesis, in the fact that speakers use the asserted existence claim to evaluate – falsely – the statement. When the presupposition is not asserted, subjects face some difficulties in the evaluation, and this is mirrored by the percentage of responses falling around the mid-value (27,27%).

With respect to topicality, the results in Abrusán and Szendröi (2013) are not confirmed: when the referentially sound NP (in my example, “Macron”) is the clefted constituent, more false outcomes are observed than cases in which the empty description is moved higher in the sentence (75,76% vs 65,71%). Observe that the clefted constituent is not the topic expression, in an aboutness sense; rather, it is the part of the sentence occurring after the complementizer.

In Abrusán and Szendröi (2013), left dislocated structures are employed, and it is argued that their results are expected also if different syntactic environments triggering topicality are used. The fact that the results obtained point towards another direction calls, at least, for further investigations, both from an experimental point of view and from a theoretical perspective, most notably on topics and cleft constructions, which carry nontrivial considerations on pre- supposition accommodation (Ebert & Ebert 2010; Felka 2015). Moreover, these findings should be supported by supplementary studies, employing online and not offline measures. However, I believe that the present results are suitable as a starting point, for, at the very least, the proportion of items per participants is much more statistically stable.

References

Abrusán, Márta and Kriszta Szendröi (2013). “Experimenting with the King of France: Topics, Verifiability and Definite Descriptions”. In: Semantics and Pragmatics 6.10, pp. 1–43.

Ebert, Christian and Cornelia Ebert (2010). “On squeamishness of the royal kind”. In: Language and Logos: Studies in Theoretical and Computational Linguistics 72, p. 149.

Felka, Katharina (2015). “On the presuppositions of number sentences”. In: Synthese 192.5, pp. 1393–1412.

Lasersohn, Peter (1993). “Existence presuppositions and background knowledge”. In: Journal of semantics 10.2, pp. 113–122.

Russell, Bertrand (1905). “On Denoting”. In: Mind 14.56, pp. 479–493. Strawson, Peter F. (1950). “On Referring”. In: Mind 59.235, pp. 320–344.

— (1964). “Identifying Reference and Truth-Values”. In: Theoria 30.2, pp. 96– 118.

Von Fintel, Kai (2004). “Would you believe it? The King of France is back! (Pre- suppositions and truth-value intuitions)”. In: Descriptions and Beyond. Ed. by Marga Reimer and Anne Bezuidenhout. Oxford University Press, pp. 315– 341.