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names such as John and descriptions such as the son of John do not have any presuppositional power but acquire it when inserted into a sentence. If one asserts that the son of John is ill, one presupposes that there is (somewhere) an individual who is the son of John. At the end of this paper we will discuss another category of presuppositions, the co-textual, but only as a suggestion for further inquiry. |
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We have excluded, by force of our introductory definitions, some phenomena from the range of presuppositions. For instance, we cannot agree to the definition of results of logical inferences as presuppositional phenomena. It is arguable that (4) presupposes (5): |
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(4) All literary critics at Yale like deconstruction. |
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(5) Some literary critics at Yale like deconstruction. |
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Sentence (4) does not presuppose sentence (5) because (5) does not have to be taken for granted as background information in order to accept (4), in the sense that A can fail to draw the inference (5) from (4); the inference (5) is potentially implied by (4) but not explicitly conveyed by the sentence uttered by S. When (4) is submitted to the negation test, if the negation is an external one (it is false that all literary critics at Yale like deconstruction), it remains unclear whether (5) is deleted or not. If, on the contrary, the negation is an internal one (and in a natural language it will sound like the assertion that all Yale literary critics dislike deconstruction), then (5) is deleted. We know that in natural languages the boundaries between external and internal negation are very imprecise, but precisely because of the ambiguity of this case we are entitled to deny it the label of presupposition. (Notice, by the way, to what extent the authors of this paper are uninterested in what-is-the-case: as a matter of fact, most of the literary critics at Yale do like deconstruction.)* In the same vein, it would be preposterous to say that the expression man ''presupposes" a series of semantic properties, namely, rational, mortal, featherless two-legged animal. Such an expression directly means these properties (and many others), but it can be uttered and understood even without having the intention of conveying most of them, and none of them should necessarily be taken for grantedin any case, it is questionable which one should be taken as a necessary one. Language is a human mechanism designed to express by few and utterable expressions a lot of things (content), and this content is submitted to the law of interpretation, so that every term can imply a proposition, and every |
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*(Note 1990) This was true at the time this paper was written. |
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