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A Response to Abbott on and Common Ground Author(s): Robert Stalnaker Reviewed work(s): Source: and , Vol. 31, No. 5 (2008), pp. 539-544 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40270149 . Accessed: 25/07/2012 15:02

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http://www.jstor.org Linguist and Philos (2008) 31:539-544 DOI 10.1007/s10988-008-9047-9

RESEARCH ARTICLE

A response to Abbott on presupposition and common ground

Robert Stalnaker

Publishedonline: 13 January2009 © SpringerScience+Business Media B.V. 2009

BarbaraAbbott's paperraises some interestinggeneral questions about the model of discourse that I have developed and used, but I am not persuadedthat the data she presents cast any doubt on the assumptionsof that model. The examples she pre- sents show that there are informative ,and appropriatebut unin- formative assertions, but that was never in question. Let me sketch the general Gricean motivationfor my picture of assertion and common ground, and then look at her examples and arguments. The of speaker was the fundamentalconcept of 's account of speech, and it was his central thesis that this concept can and should be analyzed independentlyof any institutionallinguistic practice. He differed in this * respect both from some of the original 'ordinarylanguage" such as J. L. Austin and Peter Strawson,and from some later philosophersof such as . The reason he insisted on this was that he wanted to give a basis for understandingthe institution of language as a device that has the function of meaning things, and to separate an account of the functions that language was designed to serve from an account of the means that language provides for serving those functions. The hope was that separating means from ends would help to clarify the specific conventional mechanisms that language provides, and the way they interact with general principles of instrumentalrationality in explaining why people say what they say in trying to achieve their communicative ends. One importantupshot of Grice's development of this programwas the recognition that, while language was a device to facilitate meaning things (for language users, the simplest and most straightforwardway to mean something is to say it), once the device is in place, it becomes possible to use it to mean something different from what one says. In fact, given the general featuresof the concept of speakermeaning (to mean somethingis to act with a manifest intentionto affect the attitudesof one's

R. Stalnaker(El) MIT, Cambridge,MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

â Springer 540 R. Stalnaker interlocutor by the means of the recognition of that intention.), it is inevitable that saying will in some cases diverge from Gricean speaker meaning. The relationship between saying and meaning is a subtle and complex issue in Grice's work that he recognized was not fully resolved, but many of the general patterns of reasoning that account for the divergence are relatively clear. They are made explicit in Grice's work on conversational implicature. My account of assertion and common ground was guided by these Gricean ideas, and the potential divergence, brought out by Grice, between what is said and what is meant was a salient concern from the beginning. There is a correlative divergence between two ways of thinking about the context in which speakers means and says things. Any act of meaning something is performed against a background of shared information, and this information is relevant to determining both the communicative intentions of speakers, and the means that they can use to realize them. (One will act to induce a belief only if the interlocutor does not already have it, and one will choose a means that one can reasonably expect to succeed.) But asserting is saying, rather than meaning, and has to be understood as a move in an institutional practice of speech. Speech acts in a conventional linguistic practice also require a back- ground context, and just as there is a meaning-saying contrast, there is a corre- sponding potential divergence between the information actually shared by the participants in a conversation and a body of information that is constrained by the constitutive rules of the conventional practice, and that provides the background against which the speech acts that are performed by the participants of that practice are interpreted. The common ground is part of the conversational score, to use David Lewis's metaphor, in an game of speech. A divergence between common ground, in this sense, and common knowledge or belief is as inevitable as the Gricean divergence between saying and meaning, and for the same reasons. But just as it is important for understanding a conventional communicative practice to understand saying as the normal way of meaning something, so it is important for understanding the role of common ground to see it as modeled on what the par- ticipants take to be common knowledge. The notion of presupposition accommodation was first characterized, as such, by David Lewis, but the pattern of reasoning involved was familiar from Grice's work on conversational implicature. One presumes that speakers are speaking coopera- tively, and infers that they have the intentions and beliefs that are necessary to make sense of their speech acts, on this presumption. If the inference about what the speaker intends and believes is sufficiently obvious, then it may be reasonable to infer that the speaker intended the addressee to make this inference. Similarly, if the presumption of cooperative speech requires that the speaker be taking something to be common ground, and if this inference is sufficiently obvious, then it is reasonable for the addressee to take the speaker to be taking it to be common ground, and if the addressee is also willing to accept it, then he too will take it to be common ground, in which case it will be common ground. Part of my point in spelling out the iterated structure of common belief and common ground in my paper "Common Ground" was to give this pattern of reasoning a precise formulation. In some cases, such as the "sister" examples, the pattern did not require any divergence between common ground and common belief. What it did require was care in specifying the time at

£i Springer A response to Abbott on presupposition and common ground 541 which the relevant iterated attitudes were said to hold. In a case of accommodation, the information accommodated was obviously not common ground prior to the , since the accommodation is a response to it. The general framework (like Grice's general framework) makes no specific empirical claims about what the expressions of any language mean, say, or pre- suppose. What it does is to provide a structure in which empirical claims about the and of natural can be stated and assessed. But Abbott thinks that the framework conflicts with empirical facts about the way language is used. Let me respond to some of the objections: 1. Abbott (following Szabo) claims that if the time at which presupposed information is required to be common ground is only after the speech act takes place, then sentences such as (5) should be appropriate, even if it was not known, prior to the speech act, that the speaker had a daughter.

(5) We all know that I have a daughter.

I agree that this would not be appropriate to make in this circumstance, but why should it follow from the account that it is? I don't see why a thesis about when presupposed material is required to be common ground has any consequences for the interpretation of the tense in an explicit statement. Whatever one says about presuppositions, it seems to me most natural to say that (5) is false, in the supposed situation since it makes a claim about what was known at the time at which the statement was made, and it is not appropriate to make manifestly false statements. But perhaps one thinks that the present tense could be taken to be the time at which the statement ends. In this case, the statement is true, but the account does not imply that it is thereby appropriate. Consider the statement: "we all will know, as soon as I finish talking, that I have a sister." This is true, but a decidedly odd thing to say, and the oddity is not hard to explain. Why communicate the information that you have a sister in such a strangely indirect way? 2. Abbott argues that my account of the mechanism of presupposition accom- modation in the "sister" case "runs the risk of doing away with the distinction between presupposition and assertion altogether." It is right that one cannot simply read the distinction between what is asserted and what is accommodated off of the data, just as one cannot distinguish what is said from what is conversationally implicated simply on the basis of what is normally communicated by some speech act. But the general account does provide some guidance for distinguishing the consequences of assertion from those of presupposition accommodation. One relevant fact (as I noted in the passage that Abbott quotes) is that, in cases of accommodation, the information that is added to the context continues to be accepted even if the assertion itself is rejected. Even if you reject my claim that I have to pick up my sister, you continue to accept, as common ground, that I have a sister. A related point: in cases of presupposition accommodation the informa- tion is communicated even when the relevant is merely supposed, rather than asserted. (When I say "If I have to pick up my sister, I won't be able to come to the meeting", you add to the common ground that I have a sister, but not that I have to pick her up.)

â Springer 542 R. Stalnaker

Abbott acknowledges this between assertion and presupposition accommodation,but says that "there is nothing in Stalnaker's analysis to explain why this is so." But the generalaccount of assertiondoes explain this difference.The assumptionis that an assertion is something like a proposal to add the information that is the content of the assertion to the common ground, and a rejection of the proposalis a normalmove in the conversationalgame. Accommodatedinformation is communicated indirectly, so that there is no provision for straightforwardly rejecting it. (One has to say something like "Hey, wait a minute" - one of the tests that Kai von Fintel has used to identify presupposition.)That is why accommodated information survives rejection, and it is why it is inappropriateto communicate informationthat is either controversialor noteworthyby presupposingit. 3. Abbott suggests that the "sister" example is a special case, and that even if we could distinguishassertion from accommodatedpresupposition in that kind of case, there are many cases where the presupposed information is not just background informationto which the speakeris presumedto have privileged access. She argues that the distinction may be more difficult to make in the other case. She gives many examples, and I agree that they are good examples of presuppositionaccommo- dation, but I don't think they pose a problem for the account. Explanationsfor why it is appropriateto communicate indirectly in this way are diverse, like the expla- nations for conversationalimplicature. There are simple cases of implicaturewhere background information is communicated indirectly simply because it is more efficient, and there is no point in making explicit what the hearercan figure out. (As in Grice's "I'm out of petrol", "There is a garage around the corner" case, in which it is implicatedthat the garage is open, and sells petrol). There are also cases (like Grice's famous letter of recommendationexample, implicating that the can- didate is a mediocre talent by speaking only of his handwritingand punctuality) where the indirectnessis more manifest, and the explanationproceeds by the prima facie flouting of conversational rules. Similarly, there will be different kinds of reasons for the fact that one chooses to communicate by presuppositionaccom- modation ratherthan by straightforwardassertion. But the facts that the phenom- enon is pervasive, and that the explanations are diverse, are not good reasons to object, so long as the facts can be explained. Several of Abbott's examples are from newspaper stories. She claims that newspaper examples are particularlyproblematic for the common ground view, since "written utterancesthat are intended for a wide audience . . . with whom the speakercan assume only the bare minimumof sharedbackground knowledge." But on the contrary, I think this fact helps to explain why the rhetorical device of communicatingby presupposingis so common in this context. The news reporter does not want either to talk down to the knowledgeable or to leave the ignorant behind. Informativelypresupposing things is a good way to have it both ways. A similar kind of explanationapplies to example (8)b: "I wonder whetheryou realize that Bahle's is closed today." The speaker does not want to presuppose that the addressee is unawareof this fact, but also does not want to leave her unaware,in case she is. Some of Abbott's other examples seem to me similar to the "sister" case in that the informationpresupposed is easily accommodated,and it would be tedious to

Çy Springer A response to Abbott on presupposition and common ground 543 make it explicit, (e.g.: "if you are going into the bedroom, would you mind bringing back the big bag of potato chips that I left on the bed!" I could say, "I left a big bag of potato chips on the bed. If you are going into the bedroom, would you mind bringing it back?" But this seems unnecessary.) In general, Abbott makes a good case that the phenomenon of accommodation is pervasive, but does not explain why this should be a problem. 4. Abbott argues that the account of assertion, as well as the account of pre- suppositon, is mistaken, since there are appropriate but uninformative assertions. But this is a problem only if one ignores the differences between the common ground and what is actually common knowledge or belief. Divergences need to be explained, but they are to be expected. As with informative presupposition, there is a diversity of cases: (i) Abbott says that examples of so-called "phatic communion" ("Beautiful day, isn't it!" "We sure need rain") are "without any pretense of being informative." But on the contrary, I think they do involve a pretense of informative communication, and this kind a speech would not have the functions that it does have (e.g. establishing rapport) if it did not involve such a pretense, (ii) A number of Abbott's examples involve ritual or explicitly institutional speech acts ("This is the dissertation defense of Susan B. Candidate.") Such examples are the cases where it is most salient that speech is a move in a conventional institutional game where the dynamics of actual information exchange may come apart from the dynamics of changes in the conversational score. There is, in this kind of case, perhaps an idealized audience (the record) that is being informed. But in any case, I think it is not unnatural to think of this kind of practice as one that is modeled on real communication, (iii) Some of Abbott's examples of uninformative assertions are reminders: cases where one tells someone something that they know, but that they may have momentarily forgotten, or that is at least not immediately available, or salient. I don't think it is quite right to describe such cases as uninformative, though they do bring out the complexity of the notion of informativeness. Reminders are at least locally informative, and that is enough for them to fit the model, (iv) Some of Abbott's examples involve what is obviously nonliteral com- ' munication. One who says It goes without saying that we need to fix our cash flow problem" manifestly believes that it does not go without saying that we need to fix our cash flow problem - that is why he said it. The person who said "Linguistics is a science - I need hardly remind this group of that!" for some reason felt a need to remind this group that linguistics is a science. Abbott recognizes that these state- ments involve "a curious kind of contradiction". Such cases, along with the blatant tautologies that she mentions like "it is what it is" and "it ain't over till it's over" are, as Abbott acknowledges, paradigm cases of violations of maxims that require reinterpretation- just the kind of reinterpretation that Grice's maxims, and my assumption of informativeness are used to explain, (v) Abbott notes that some utterances are "intended to focus the attention of one's address(s) on a common ground proposition in order to set a discourse topic or otherwise manage the con- versation." I agree with this, and it is an aspect of the dynamics of discourse that needs more attention than it is given in my discussions of assertion. Some tautol- ogies, for example, are not (like "it is what it is") ways of implicating something informative, but instead ways of partitioning the space to make salient a distinction

£) Springer 544 R. Stalnaker between possibilities. So one might begin a discussion of contingency plans for tomorrow by saying "either it will be raining, or it won't be". The point is to set up a discussion of what to do in each of the two cases. Clearly, not all speech acts are aimed at cutting down the common ground, and one should broaden the theory to give a systematic account of the ones that are not. Abbott says, at one point, that the model of assertion and common ground that I present "is an oversimplified picture of conversation." To echo the rat in the cartoon reproduced in her paper, "needless to say." The model is a highly idealized framework that needs both further development, and care in its use to represent and explain the phenomena of speech. But oversimplification is often a good place to start, and I don't think the considerations that Abbott has raised show that the assumptions of the model are not essentially right.

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