Pressupposition accommodation vs presupposition contextualization: Wgy PGA is false

Abstract

In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry titled ‘Presupposition,’ the authors accurately report the following:

            It is widely agreed that the following empirical generalization, made explicit by Heim (1983), is correct:

            PGA: Global accommodation is preferred to non-global accommodation.

I will argue that PGA is false. In section 1 I will explicate PGA by examining the widely accepted pragmatic-dynamic conception of presupposition and by clarifying why this approach requires recognition of both global accommodation and local (non-global) accommodation of the presupposition. In section 2 I will demonstrate why Heim’s influential abductive argument from 1983 in support of PGA fails because it conflates (i) the process by which a conversational addressee accommodates a presupposition triggered by a speaker’s utterance of a presupposition-triggering sentence, with (ii) the process by which a theorist, considering an isolated occurrence of a presupposition-triggering sentence, contextualizes the presupposition triggered by that sentence. In section 3 I contend that there are theoretically persuasive reasons against PGA. I conclude, in section 4, with a metatheoretical