Presuppositions on FactivesAuthor(s): Deirdre WilsonSource: Linguistic Inquiry, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Summer, 1972), pp. 405-410Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4177728 .

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SQUIBS AND DISCUSSION

PRESUPPOSITIONS ON FACTIVES

Deirdre Wilson, University College London

Kiparsky and Kiparsky (1970) argue that factive verbs (such as know, regret, realise) carry presuppositions about the truth of their complements. According to them, associated with both positive and negative sentences (i) and (2) will be the sentence (3), where (3) is not part of what the speaker asserts, but part of what he presupposes.

(i) John knows that Nixon is bald. (2) John doesn't know that Nixon is bald. (3) Nixon is bald.

I have seen nothing in the literature which disagrees with this view, but I should like to raise a related point. For Kiparsky and Kiparsky, presuppositions exist in the mind of a speaker, the presence of a factive verb in a spoken sentence signalling that the speaker has the relevant pre- supposition in mind. Let me call this psychological pheno- menon speaker-presupposition. Those who believe in the existence of speaker-presuppositions tend to fall into two further groups: those who also believe that presupposition is a logical, as well as a psychological relation: in other words, that sentences, as well as speakers, presuppose; and those who do not. I call this further type of presupposi- tion logical presupposition since it has a lot in common with the typical logical relation of entailment. Logical presupposition, like entailment, holds between two sentences, and just as there are necessary relations between the truth values of entailed and entailing sentences, so there are necessary relations between the truth values of presupposed and presupposing sentences. Now entailment is clearly an extremely important relation for semantics, since it is on the basis of, and to account for, entailment relations between sentences (e.g. My pet is a vixen and My pet is a

fox) that semantic features on lexical items are set up at all. I want to argue that the same is not true of logical presupposition, and that there is no reason in doing semantics to talk of logical presupposition as well as of entailment.

Logically speaking, presupposition is usually defined as differing from entailment in that, if an entailment is false its related (entailing) sentence is also false, whereas if a presupposition is false, then its related (presupposing) sentences are said to lack a truth value, that is, to be neither true nor false. Taking sentences (I)-(3) above as examples, and assuming that (3) is false, then if (3) is a presupposition of (i) and (2), (i) and (2) must be said to lack a truth value, whereas if (3) is entailed by (i), though not by (2),

then (i) will be false, but its negation, (2), will be true. In other words, there will be crucial differences as regards

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406 SQUIBS AND DISCUSSION

truth value assignment and the analysis of truth conditions between assuming that (3) is a presupposition of (i) and (2)

and assuming that it is an entailment of (i) and neither an entailment nor a presupposition of (2). My purpose in attempting to show that (3) is not a presupposition, and that in general factive verbs do not carry presuppositions, is naturally bound up with my belief that the relation between (i) and (3) is an entailment relation. More broadly, I believe that it is never necessary to talk of logical presuppo- sitions as distinct from entailments. I have found references in the following works which imply that their authors believe in the existence of logical presuppositions: Fraser (I97i), Keenan (I97I), G. Lakoff (970), Chomsky (I97I), and Strawson (I952). However, I do not know whether any of them explicitly believes that factives carry logical presuppositions as opposed to entailments, which is the position I am attacking here.

The following argument, which could be set out in logical form although I have stated it informally, seems to me to be entirely valid, and to prove that it is wrong to talk of factives as presupposing the truth of their comple- ments. I believe that its premises are fully grammatical, true statements, and that its conclusion, which follows deductively from the premises, is also both fully grammatical and true.

Premise i: No one {can know} that Nixon is bald

unless Nixon is bald. Premise 2: Nixon is not bald.

Conclusion i: No one knows tht Ni i ~can know~ htNxni bald. (from Pi, P2)

Premise 3: John is a person. Conclusion 2: John does not know that Nixon is

bald.1 (from P3, PI, P2, via Ci)

The point is that Conclusion 2 is deduced from Premise 2, among others. Conclusion 2 is a factive sentence with a complement, and Premise 2 is the negation of that comple- ment. Thus the truth of Conclusion 2 follows from the assumption that its complement is false. But it clearly makes no sense to talk of Conclusion 2 as presupposing the

1 Speaking more formally, Conclusion I follows from Premises I

and 2 by modus ponendo ponens. Conclusion 2 follows from Conclusion I, and thus from the same premises, as long as we make explicit such necessary additional premises as that John is a person, and, for the can version, that if someone cannot do something then he does not do that thing.

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SQUIBS AND DISCUSSION

truth of its complement when it in fact follows logically from its falsity. For, assume that Conclusion 2 may both presuppose the truth of its complement and follow logically from its falsity, and assume that its complement is false. Then, since Conclusion 2 follows logically from the falsity of its complement, Conclusion 2 must be true. But we know from the definition of presupposition that if Conclusion 2 is true, its presupposition must also be true, or Conclusion 2 would lack a truth-value. Therefore the presupposition of Conclusion 2 is true, namely, that its complement is true. Thus from the assumption that Conclusion 2 may both presuppose the truth of its complement and follow logically from its falsity, we can establish the reductio ad absurdum that the complement of Conclusion 2 must be both true and false. And since I have shown that Conclusion 2 does in fact follow logically from the assumption that its comple- ment is false, it follows that Conclusion 2, a factive, not only does not, but cannot presuppose the truth of its complement.

Anyone who wants to maintain that factives carry logical presuppositions will have to reject the above argument as invalid. It seems to me that it is obviously valid, and that my original sentence (3) is therefore not a presupposition of sentences (i) and (2). And in fact, if the argument is valid, then the assumption that sentence (I) entails, rather than presupposes, sentence (3) will account for its validity, for on this assumption the negation of sentence (3) will in turn entail sentence (2), which is also Conclusion 2 of the argument. Thus, if one sees positive factives as entailing the truth of their complements rather than presupposing it, one explains why the argument goes through.2

The following facts, pointed out to me by Jay Keyser, seem to give some additional support to my conclusion. It has often been noted that when two sentences are con- joined, if the first entails the second, the result is a perform- ance oddity, as in

(4) ?My father is French bud he is European.

(5) ?Billy is a cave-dweller budt he lives in a cave.

2 Anyone who wants to maintain this view is going to have to account for the fact that negative factives are usually taken as committing the speaker to the truth of their complements. What I am saying is that they do not always or necessarily do this-as in the argument above. For an attempt at explaining why it is even possible for them to do so, see my MIT dissertation on presuppositions (in preparation).

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408 SQUIBS AND DISCUSSION

If my original sentence (i) entails (3), and (2) does not entail (3), we would expect the conjunction of (i) and (3) to result in a performance oddity, and the conjunction of (2) and (3) not to. On the other hand, if (i) and (2) both presuppose (3), we would expect the conjunctions of (i)

and (3) and (2) and (3) to be equally acceptable or odd. I think that there is indeed a difference in acceptability between the conjunctions, which implies that the relevant relation is entailment and not presupposition:

(6) [_ (I, (3)] ?John knows that Nixon is bald but} Nixon is bald. tand)

(7) [= (2), (3)] John doesn't know that Nixon is

bald but Nixon is bald. tand)

Clearly (7) is much better with but instead of and. The fact that (4), (5), and (6) are all markedly worse with but instead of and further supports the view that the same thing is going on in (4), (5), and (6), but not in (7).

The performance oddity in (4) and (5) disappears if the conjunction and so is used instead of and:

(8) Billy is a cave-dweller, and so he lives in a cave. (9) My father is French, and so he's European.

Here the fact that the first conjunct entails the second gives an adequate ground for asserting the second, and so indicat- ing that this ground exists. Again, if the relation between (i) and (3) and (2) and (3) is one of presupposition, we would expect their conjunctions with and so to be equally acceptable or unacceptable, and if the relation between (i) and (3), but not (2) and (3), is that of entailment, then we would expect the conjunction of (i) and (3), but not of (2) and (3), to be acceptable. This last is in fact what happens:

(io) John knows that Nixon is bald, and so Nixon is bald.

(i I) ?John doesn't know that Nixon is bald, and so Nixon is bald.

The fact that (ii) is a complete non sequitur should be particularly puzzling for those who believe that the first conjunct in both (i o) and (i i) presupposes the second. For in (io) the relation between the first and second conjuncts gives adequate ground for asserting the second, whereas in (I I) it clearly does not. The obvious conclusion is that there is a different relation between the conjuncts in (io) and (ii), and the similarity in behavior of (Io) to (8) and (9) indicates that the relation in (io) is that of entailment, and

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SQUIBS AND DISCUSSION

not presupposition. This is what my original argument was designed to show.

I have mentioned two approaches to the semantic analysis of factives: one of which predicts that a negative factive will lack a truth value if its complement is false, and the other of which predicts that a negative factive will be true under the same conditions. I have tried to show that the validity of a very simple argument can be explained only on the assumption that the truth of a nega- tive factive is not only compatible with, but also deducible from, the falsity of its complement. I have also suggested that a positive factive behaves under various forms of conjunction with its own complement exactly as any other sentence behaves under conjunction with its own entail- ments. A presuppositional analysis of factives can neither predict nor explain these facts, while an analysis in terms of entailment alone both predicts and explains them.

One further point. One who believes in the existence of logical presuppositions might be tempted to assume that my original argument only goes through because there also exists a phenomenon called "presupposition cancelling". By this line of reasoning, a factive would normally carry the logical presupposition that its complement is true, but in special cases (as in the argument I have used) its pre- supposition may be explicitly cancelled by the assertion that its complement is in fact false. In other words, I have only drawn attention to a slightly deviant use of factives, and not a central one-for in all cases where a presupposition is not explicitly cancelled it must be held to exist. It was partly to preempt this move that I mentioned psychological presuppositions at the beginning of this paper. Certainly a speaker who uses a factive, whether positive or negative, usually implies that he believes (is making the psychological presupposition) that its complement is true, and in the case of negative factives at least, it is always open to him to say explicitly that he is not making this presupposition. Hence psychological presuppositions are genuinely cancellable. However, if we consider the cancellation of logical pre- suppositions, we can see that this reduces to making the explicit assertion that the presupposition in question is false. Returning to the definition of logical presuppositions, it will be remembered that these were defined in such a way that if the logical presupposition is false, then the related factive sentence must lack a truth value. Hence, asserting that the presupposition is false should immediately entail that the related factive sentence does indeed lack a truth value. But in the argument I used, asserting that the presupposition was false in fact entailed that the related

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410 SQUIBS AND DISCUSSION

sentence was true. Now presupposition cancelling should not suspend the operation of logical laws. Hence the logical law at work here seems to be, again, not presupposition, but entailment.

References

Bierwisch, M. and K. Heidolph, eds. (1970) Progress in Linguistics, Mouton and Co., The Hague.

Chomsky, N. (197I) "Deep Structure, Surface Structure and Semantic Interpretation," in Steinberg and Jakobovits, eds. (I97I.

Fillmore, C. and D. T. Langendoen, eds. (I97I) Studies in Linguistic Semantics, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York.

Fraser, B. (1971) "An Analysis of 'Even' in English," in Fillmore and Langendoen, eds. (I97I).

Keenan, E. (1971) "Two Kinds of Presupposition in Natural Language," in Fillmore and Langendoen, eds. (0970)

Kiparsky, P. and C. Kiparsky (1970) "Fact," in Bierwisch and Heidolph, eds. (1970).

Lakoff, G. (1970) "Linguistics and Natural Logic," Synthese 22, I51-27I.

Steinberg, P. and L. A. Jakobovits, eds. (1971) Semantics, an Interdisciplinary Reader, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Strawson, P. (1952) Introduction to Logical Theory, Methuen, London.

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