Presuppositions are usually considered a semantic type of contents whereby an identifiable linguistic expression or format triggers a background assumption in the sense of some pre-conditions necessary to assign a truth-value to a given sentence. In de Saussure (2013; 2014), it is suggested that some weakly communicated assumptions which are raised by whole utterances in context bear similarities with classical ‘presuppositions’ in that they do not belong to the ostensive meaning intended by a speaker but rather serve as preconditions for the relevance (Sperber & Wilson 1995) of the utterance.

For example, an utterance like “Firearms are forbidden in these premises” presupposes trivially, in this weaker ‘discursive’ sense, that firearms could have been authorized here, that they may be authorized in other premises, etc. These are in no way preconditions to (truth-conditional) meaning and they are entirely inferred – in this respect, they look like implicatures, but implicatures that are out of the focus of the speaker. Yet their similarities with presuppositions make them a special category which de Saussure calls ‘Discursive Presuppositions’.

In this paper, we focus on presupposition accommodation, nuancing von Fintel’s implicit claim that they are under voluntary control (cf. von Fintel 2000: 11). Experiments in cognitive psychology (cf. Loftus & Palmer 1974, Loftus & Zanni 1975, Bredart & Modolo 1988, Park & Reder 2004) and attested examples from the political scene (cf. Trump’s campaign slogan ‘Make America Great Again’) show to what extent presupposition accommodation can lead to some major epistemic inconsistencies. Such ‘presuppositional traps’ seem to be incompatible with the idea that the listener consciously chooses to accommodate them.

We will propose that presupposition accommodation should be viewed as a mental heuristic (Gigerenzer 2008) which borrows energy-saving paths to process background information. A trade-off of its efficiency is that it leads to epistemic errors. We suggest that presupposition accommodation bypasses epistemic vigilance mechanisms because it anchors on intuitive heuristics (Tversky & Kahneman 1974).

 

 

 

 

References:

 

Bredart, S., & Modolo, K. (1988). Moses strikes again: Focalization effect on a semantic illusion. Acta Psychologica, 67(2), 135-144.

 

Gigerenzer, G. (2008). Why heuristics work. Perspectives on psychological science, 3(1), pp. 20-29.

Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 13(5), 585-589.

Loftus, E. F., & Zanni, G. (1975). Eyewitness testimony: The influence of the wording of a question. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 5(1), 86-88.

Park, H., & Reder, L. M. (2004). Moses illusion: Implication for human cognition. Cognitive illusions, 275-291.

Saussure, L. De. (2013). Background relevance. Journal of Pragmatics, 59, pp. 178-189.

Saussure, L. De. (2014). Présuppositions discursives, assertion d’arrière-plan et persuasion. In Herman, T. & Oswald S. (éds), Rhétorique et cognition: perspectives théoriques et stratégies persuasives/Rhetoric & Cognition theoretical perspectives and persuasive strategies. Peter Lang, Berne, pp. 279 - 311.

Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. In Utility, probability, and human decision making (pp. 141-162). Springer Netherlands.

von Fintel, K. (2000). What is Presupposition Accommodation? MIT, Cambridge. Manuscript. http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/accomm.pdf