"Now any concrete train of reasoning involves three elements: Firstly, there is the reception of facts to reason about.
These facts are received either from our own senses, or from the report of other minds; that is, either experience or authority supplies us with our material. But each man’s experience is so limited that the second source is the more usual; of every hundred facts upon which to reason, ninety-nine depend on authority.
Secondly, there is the direct, simple act of the mind perceiving self-evident truth, as when we see that if A and B both equal C, then they equal each other. This act I call intuition. Thirdly, there is an art or skill of arranging the facts so as to yield a series of such intuitions which linked together produce a proof of the truth or falsehood of the proposition we are considering.
Thus in a geometrical proof each step is seen by intuition, and to fail to see it is to be not a bad geometrician but an idiot. The skill comes in arranging the material into a series of intuitable “steps.” Failure to do this does not mean idiocy, but only lack of ingenuity or invention. Failure to follow it need not mean idiocy, but either inattention or a defect of memory which forbids us to hold all the intuitions together.
Now all correction of errors in reasoning is really correction of the first or the third element. The second, the intuitional element, cannot be corrected if it is wrong, nor supplied if it is lacking. You can give the man new facts. You can invent a simpler proof, that is, a simpler concatenation of intuitable truths. But when you come to an absolute inability to see any one of the self-evident steps out of which the proof is built, then you can do nothing.
Every teacher knows that people are constantly protesting that they “can’t see” some self-evident inference, but the supposed inability is usually a refusal to see, resulting either from some passion which wants not to see the truth in question or else from sloth which does not want to think at all."
How presuppositions for and against God's Word directs the creation and evolution debate through facts, evidence, interpretation, and worldview.
by Ken Ham | In the ongoing war between creation and evolution, Christians are always looking for the strongest evidence for creation. They are looking for the “magic bullet” that will prove to their evolutionist friends that creation is true and evolution is false. This craving for evidence has led some Christians to be...
Lingthusiasm Episode 19: Sentences with baggage - Presuppositions
What’s so weird if I say, “the present King of France is bald” or “I need to pick up my pet unicorn from the vet”? It seems like those sentences should be false: at least, they certainly can’t be true. But if you reply, “No, he isn’t” or “No, you don’t” it still feels unsatisfying: aren’t we still both assuming that France has a king and that I have a pet unicorn?
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore different kinds of meanings: sometimes sentences wear their meaning on their sleeves, but sometimes they instead smuggle it in as baggage. These assumptions are known as presuppositions. Presuppositions are incredibly useful (we couldn’t manage conversations at a normal pace without them), but in the wrong hands (such as when you’re trying to influence an eyewitness) they can also be very dangerous.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
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Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
New Lingthusiasm merch: pictures of the new tree diagram scarves, Heck Yeah Language Change/Heck Yeah Descriptivism items, and existing items in new colours
Presupposition in the Lizzie Bennet Diaries
The King of France
Your favourite etymological dictionary
Denying things with presupposition in Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Why do people want to eat babies? (it’s called playful aggression/cute aggression)
Accents and presupposition
Emily Bender picking apart a presupposition (Twitter)
Big Bird presupposition (Twitter)
"welcome back" on a neighbourhood pub sign (Sherry Yong Chen, Twitter)
Boasting through presuppositions (Julie Sedivy on Language Log)
Leading questions and the eyewitness report (paper by Elizabeth Loftus, pdf)
Memory influenced by implanting presuppositions (Elizabeth Allyn Smith on Télé-Québec, video in French)
Presupposition (Wikipedia)
Presupposition (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Presuppositions, Implicatures, and Entailments (The Ling Space)
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Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Emily Gref, our production assistant is Celine Yoon, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
In our episode on how the semantics and pragmatics of presupposition work, we looked at how some sentences carry presuppositions, and how these kinds of assumptions come about. We worked out that they grow out of an interaction between the meanings of certain words, and a rule on how new information impacts the relationship between speakers in any given conversation.
We also mentioned that once a presupposition gets its claws into a sentence, it tends not to let go. If we try to shake it loose by flipping the sentence upside down — adding in a “not” — we find that it manages to hang on. Consider the following two sentences.
(1a) Nina regrets that she searched for her father
(1b) Nina doesn’t regret that she searched for her father
The word “regret” is a presupposition trigger; whenever it appears in a sentence, the clause that follows must be true — at least, if the sentence has any hope of making sense. So, (1a) presupposes that Nina searched for her father, since it would be a very strange thing to say if she hadn’t. But even with that “not” in there, in (1b), the assumption sticks around.
So, how does this work? If you keep going, we’ve got a bunch of explanations and calculations for you!
First, let’s take a look at how a presupposition makes its way into a sentence in the first place. If certain words, like “know” and “regret,” are responsible for bringing presuppositions into sentences, their meanings must somehow encode this. Setting aside the finer details, and focusing in on how it combines with other words, the semantic value of “regret” would look like this:
(2) “regret” = λp. λx. λw: p is true (in w). x regrets p (in w)
Left-to-right, “regret” is a word which first combines with some idea — say, that she (Nina) went looking for her father. Below, the sentence on the right plugs into the p-shaped parts of the meaning of the verb on the left, giving you the (abbreviated) result up top.
And then that result connects up to some person x — in this case, Nina — such that she holds the regret in question.
All the while presupposing that the original idea is actually true. We can see that, from the very start, the notion that Nina really did search for her father shapes the assumption that gets carried by the sentence as a whole. The words following the colon keep track of all this, by describing the function’s domain — those worlds where the function actually applies.
Once everything’s put together, then, we’ve got a sentence with a restriction tacked onto it. And that’s the presupposition, in its raw form. So, to explain how that restriction survives the sentence combining with a word like “not,” we’ve got to take a closer look at how exactly that little logical word makes its living, and how it typically interacts with the words around it.
In the simplest case, we might think of “not” as being designed to combine with a sentence and reverse its truth value. So, if we take a sentence like “Buck gets along with everyone” and assume it’s true, “not” turns it around 180° and makes in false (i.e., “Buck doesn’t get along with everyone”). It’s semantic value, then, would have to look something like this (ignoring, for the sake of simplicity, that “not” isn’t usually found at the beginnings of fully-formed sentences, but somewhere in the middle):
(3) “not” = λp. λw. p is false (in w)
So, the combination of “not” and “Buck gets along with everyone” would work like so; it takes a sentence as its input, and spits out the mirror image.
When we try to combine this same version of “not” with a sentence packing a presupposition, though, the issue we’re facing becomes clear; the presupposition that was part of the original sentence effectively disappears, forming no part of the new one. This can’t be right, because it’s no longer taken for granted that the regret is true.
Looking at the problem this way, the answer to how we should account for the fact that presuppositions hang around even after a sentence combines with a word like “not” seems more obvious: we need a way of passing the presupposition up the structure, by opening a kind of “hole” inside the meaning of “not” — one just big enough to let it through. So we tweak our definition from (3) a bit, giving “not” its own kind of restriction:
(4) “not” = λp. λw: w is in the domain of p. p is false (in w)
This added ‘loophole’ gives us the result we’ve been looking for. By specifying that the original sentence’s domain should become part of the domain of the newly negated sentence, we keep the presupposition intact.
So, it turns out, presuppositions are able to survive a word like “not” by way of its peculiar semantics. It lets this kind of assumption pass through unfiltered because of the way it’s built. And other words with similar logical jobs, so quantifying words like “somebody” and “everyone,” behave in a similar way, preserving the presuppositions of whatever they happen to combine with.
(5a) Somebody regrets that they searched for their father
(5b) Everyone regrets that they searched for their father
As is par for the course in semantics, by formalizing the question in a precise enough way, this presumptuous puzzle practically solves itself!
Multiculturalism has a fascinating way of messing with our presuppositions. We find to our surprise that what is normal to one person is foreign to another, that what is good within one culture is evil within another. We find that much of what we believe to be objectively good and true has actually been filtered through a subjective cultural lens. We find that we need to look to the transcultural Bible to ask, “What does God say about this?” When …
Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 19: Sentences with baggage - Presuppositions
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 19: Sentences with baggage - Presuppositions. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 19 shownotes page.
[Music]
Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gawne.
Gretchen: And I'm Gretchen McCulloch, and today we're talking about when sentences come with baggage. But first, we have new merchandise for you!
Lauren: Whoo! New merch!
Gretchen: By very popular demand, we have scarves that have tree-structure diagrams on them – they're very subtle, there are no words, there are no labels, so they can belong to whatever theoretical framework you're interested in, whether that's syntax trees, language family trees, syllable structure trees... They look really cool, we're really excited to see them around your necks.
Lauren: We have them in grey, cream, light pink, teal, and red, and we've also taken the opportunity to add a few more colours that were requested to the IPA scarf lineup as well, so if you were thinking of getting an IPA scarf or one of our new tree scarves, we have some new colours. We also have new colours for some of the "Not judging your grammar, just analysing it" zip bags and notebooks.
Gretchen: And we also have a bunch of new items that say "Heck yeah descriptivism" or "Heck yeah language change," because we couldn't pick, so if you want to be extra excited about linguistic descriptivism or language change, you can now do that. And if you want a black, grey, teal, or light pink IPA scarf with all your favourite characters from the International Phonetic Alphabet on them, you can get those too.
Lauren: And, as always, if some of those colours don't take your fancy, all of our patrons can order custom colour merch in whatever colours they like!
Gretchen: Just go to lingthusiasm.com/merch!
[Music]
Gretchen: I am really excited about this topic, because this gets to take me back five years to when I was obsessed with watching a YouTube series called The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.
Lauren: And I watched it entirely on your recommendation.
Gretchen: And it was good! Right?
Lauren: And just for the sake of it, not because I wanted to be ready for our presupposition topic.
Gretchen: No, I think I actually got our producer Claire into it before, and then she got you into it.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: So, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is not about linguistics, it's a YouTube adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice set in the modern day, and it has very little to do with linguistics, in fact, except for the fact that one of its episodes, episode 63, has this really good example of exactly what we're talking about in this episode. And I feel like watching this episode five years ago, when I was still in grad school, I had this moment when I was like, this is exactly what I have been learning about presuppositions for. So I want to act this out for you.
Lauren: Okay. Should we act it out together?
Gretchen: Yeah, but I need to give a little bit of context first.
Lauren: Okay.
Gretchen: So, if you know anything about the story of Pride and Prejudice, you know, spoiler alert! There's – sorry, the book's really old!
Lauren: You've only had 200 years to read it, folks.
Gretchen: So, where we are up until this point is Darcy has done the first really awkward proposal to Lizzie, and she has said, "No, who are you kidding?" And then he has given her a letter where he explains himself, and because this is a YouTube vlog series, all of this has happened in the vlogs. And at this moment, Lizzie has read the letter, but she hasn't talked about it on the vlogs, because if you'll recall from the book, it has very, you know, kind of private and personal information about other people in the letter, so she doesn't feel like she can talk about it. And so at this moment, Caroline, who is Bingley's sister, who also probably has a thing for Darcy, has come over to Lizzie's videos and been like, "Hey Lizzie, so, like, what's up?" And this is where our scene starts. Do you want to be Lizzie or Caroline?
Lauren: I'm happy to be Caroline.
Gretchen: Okay.
Lauren: It's all good. Like, I'm not going to deny you the opportunity to be Lizzie in a run-through of The Lizzie Bennett Diaries.
Gretchen: I appreciate you, you're a good friend!
Lauren: I'm not a monster!
Gretchen: Caroline is also a great character, she causes all these, like, really interesting semantic moments in the story.
Lauren: I'm really happy to play the semantically integral character. Okay! Okay.
Gretchen: All right! So, Lizzie says, "You have been watching my videos!"
Lauren (as Caroline): No, I haven't! That's why I need you to catch me up!
Gretchen (as Lizzie): You've been watching my videos, and now you want to know what's in Darcy's letter.
Lauren (as Caroline): No, I don't!
Gretchen (as Lizzie): I believe an appropriate response would have been "What letter?"
Lauren (as herself again): Ooooh, busted! That's Lauren being scandalised, not Caroline being... busted...
Gretchen: Yeah, okay. Cut scene! We're back as ourselves. So what happens here, after the end of this scene – Lauren, what do you think about Caroline's, like, video-having-watched state?
Lauren: Well, she's clearly busted, as I have declared, because the response should have been "What letter?" There's this assumption that she knows about the letter, because she's not like, "Aah! Take a step back, what are you talking about?"
Gretchen: But she denied it! She's said no!
Lauren: But she said, "No, I don't know what's happening," not "no" to the earlier bit of information that is in the sentence.
Gretchen: Yeah, like, "No, I don't want to know what's in the letter. Oh wait, I still am presupposing that there's a letter."
Lauren: Yeah, so the letter is just in there as baggage.
Gretchen: Yeah, the letter gets brought along for the ride.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And so this was really interesting to me because it's a very clear example from the situational context – and of course Lizzie is not a linguist, but she's saying, "I recognise that there was this extra meaning that I was bringing along that you shouldn't have been aware of."
Lauren: Lizzie is a natural linguist!
Gretchen: She's a natural linguist! There's a similar type of thing that can happen – the classic example of this nature is if I were to say to you, "Hey Lauren, is the present king of France bald?"
Lauren: Ooh! Okay, let me think. Umm... let me think about who the present king of... hey, wait a minute!
Gretchen: What just happened!
Lauren: This is a trick question! Like, whether they're bald or not is not the relevant fact? The relevant fact is that there hasn't been a king of France since the revolution in 178... oh jeez, my history teacher is going to be very upset with me. 1789?
Gretchen: That's probably right. I don't know.
Lauren: I'll check that.
Gretchen: This is a very good Masterpiece Theatre! Yeah, so, the problem with that is again, it presupposes that there is a present king of France. In the way that if I said, "Is the present Queen of England bald?" you know, you'd have a real answer to that question.
Lauren: Oh! No, I think. It looks like her hair, but how do we know? But I feel like I'm definitely on firmer ground with that than asking about kings of France. This is a famous example because Bertrand Russell, who was a philosopher, it was one of his favourite sentences, he loved bringing this one out as a dinner party conversation piece to get people talking about how sentences come with all this additional information, and we kind of presume a whole bunch of knowledge and put it at the front.
Gretchen: That sounds like a great dinner party topic of conversation, I'm going to do that now!
Lauren: Yeah, I teach undergraduate semantics on the theory that what you're doing is teaching people how to have really great anecdotes for parties.
Gretchen: I'm into it.
Lauren: So, this is a famous one, it comes up when we're teaching this kind of thing, but it kind of comes from the philosophical tradition of understanding how meaning works? And it amuses me, because a lot of philosophers don't realise that a bunch of the time what they're doing is actually linguistics when they're doing kind of this language theory stuff. And it really just makes me happy that there are all these philosophers that think they're doing philosophy and it's like, "You're all actually linguists! You just don't know it!"
Gretchen: Everything is linguistics! I think my favourite thing about presuppositions – well, one of my many favourite things, in addition to the many jokes that rely on it – which we're definitely going to get into! One of my favourite things is that one of the ways to spot a presupposition is the response that you need to have to a sentence that has a buried presupposition. So if you reply to, you know, "Do you want to know what's in Darcy's letter?" and you say, "Yes, I do," that presupposes that Darcy wrote a letter. And if you say, "No, I don't," that still presupposes that Darcy wrote a letter. So if you want to not be Caroline and not get stuck, you have to say, "What letter?" or "Actually, I didn't know there was a letter," or "Hey, wait a minute! There was a letter?" And the "hey, wait a minute!" one gets abbreviated HWAM. H-W-A-M. It's an acronym, okay. So it's the HWAM (pronounced aitch-wham) test. You're like, "HWAM, there isn't any king of France!" "HWAM, Darcy wrote a letter?!"
Lauren: Yeah, you need a little HWAM stamp to stamp on examples.
Gretchen: Yeah!
Lauren: Declare them as presuppositionably cancellable.
Gretchen: A little stamp you can stamp on someone's forehead when they make an unwarranted presupposition. HWAM!
Lauren: HWAM!
Gretchen: You could tattoo it on your knuckles, it's got the right number of letters.
Lauren: ...yeah. I'm gonna stick with the rubber stamp, personally.
Gretchen: I mean, it also just sounds like a superhero move: HWAM! Or, HWAM! There isn't a king of France! There you go.
Lauren: Yeah. So this is a way of cancelling the presupposition. So the idea that Darcy wrote a letter is a presupposition, the idea there is a king of France is a presupposition. Instead of putting on some HWAM knuckledusters, maybe we can put on some lab coats, Gretchen.
Gretchen: Okay, we can put our linguist lab coats on.
Lauren: And try some more presupposition testing, because this is one of those great areas of linguistics where you can kind of prod at examples and see how they react and see whether you can cancel them. So if you have a "hey wait a minute" reaction, that's a good indication that there is some kind of presupposition.
Gretchen: Okay. Do you have an example for us?
Lauren: Well, we had the HWAM.
Gretchen: Okay.
Lauren: Another thing to do is to find a way that cancels it by bringing in additional information.
Gretchen: Okay.
Lauren: So, "the present king of France is bald" could be cancelled by saying, "the present king of France is bald and also not recognised as a monarch because of the revolution."
Gretchen: Oh, so there's some pretender, or some descendant that has set up a puppet court and claims to be the king of France.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Mm!
Lauren: One of my favourite presupposition cancellings is a really cheeky one because it's something that is so – we don't even think of it as a presupposition, because it's so semantically wiped for us, but when we say "good morning" –
Gretchen: Ohh!
Lauren: We say, "Good morning!" And someone goes, "No, it's not." It’s my favourite presupposition cancelling because that's the way you greet people, you just say "good morning." And it's more of a, like, "I wish you a good morning" rather than "you are having a good morning." But, you know, someone says "good morning" and you reply with, "Actually, my boss was late and the coffee shop had run out of muffins" you're cancelling their presupposition of goodness in the morning.
Gretchen: I like it.
Lauren: A slightly fancier test, but one that I think shows how complicated our presupposed knowledge is, is something that's called "projecting" in the literature, which is where really complicated sentences, or more complicated sentences, can lead to really interesting presupposition carrying or cancelling. And I'll give you two examples sentences to think about, and then we'll talk through them, Lizzie Bennet-themed. So: "Lizzie thinks that Darcy's brother is delightful" versus "Lizzie said that Darcy's brother is delightful."
Gretchen: So I think to the first one I have to go, "Hey, wait a minute! I didn't know that Darcy had a brother!"
Lauren: Yeah. But if Lizzie thinks that Darcy's brother is delightful –
Gretchen: Maybe she just thinks Bingley's actually his brother, or something.
Lauren: Maybe. Like, you can construct a reality in which you presuppose that Darcy has a brother. But if I said, "Lizzie said that Darcy's brother is delightful..."
Gretchen: Yeah, then it doesn't matter if it's true or if I think it's not true, I'm not bothered by it, because I'm just like, well, now she's asserting that.
Lauren: Yep. So because Lizzie said it, you go, "Hey, wait a minute! Why would she say he has a brother? I didn't think he did." She's saying it as some kind of, like, joke, or to throw me off-track, because it's what she says. But if if you report what she thinks, you're more likely to agree that the presupposition holds and that Darcy has a brother, or that you're misunderstanding something.
Gretchen: Hmm. But if you have, like, "Lizzie knows that Darcy's brother is delightful..."
Lauren: I think what happens is that people just run this with all permutations of possible thinking/knowing/believing.
Gretchen: Yeah, 'cause I think if I say, "Lizzie knows that Darcy's brother is delightful," that implies that I, the speaker who's saying the sentence –
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: – now I also think that Darcy has a brother and that this brother is delightful.
Lauren: Hey, wait a minute, Darcy doesn't have a brother!
Gretchen: When you first wrote these examples, I went in and changed them, because I was like, "It has to be Darcy's sister, 'cause he doesn't have a brother."
Lauren: I can't believe you didn't trust me.
Gretchen: And then I was like, "Wait, wait, this is what you're trying to do."
Lauren: This is the point of the examples.
Gretchen: This is the point of these examples.
Lauren: I feel sorry for people who don't know anything about Lizzie Bennet Diaries, or Pride and Prejudice, or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or Pride and Prejudice BBC, or Pride and Prejudice the film, because they're like, "Yeah, Darcy might have a brother, whatever."
Gretchen: Whatever, who cares. Yeah, if you don't know, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is free, you can watch it on YouTube, it'll take... many hours.
Lauren: Yeah. Okay, so that's some ways that we can kind of pick apart presuppositions, and we can see that they're quite complicated and slippery, and it's not always as easy immediately as, like, "Whoa, what king of France?"
Gretchen: Yeah, they require certain amount of world knowledge as well.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Because oftentimes we accommodate a presupposition without even really thinking about it. Like, the king of France one gets us because that's part of world knowledge that there isn't a king of France.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: But I'm sure if I said to some people, "The president of Canada is bald," people might be like, "Oh, okay!" Wait a second, Canada has a prime minister!
Lauren: Oh, yeah, I didn't even pay attention to that.
Gretchen: Yeah! We know a certain amount of whether France is a monarchy, because the French Revolution was a pretty big deal but –
Lauren: It was a pretty big deal.
Gretchen: – in more subtle cases of world knowledge, you don't necessarily pick that kind of thing up.
Lauren: Yeah. Do you know what's really upsetting to me?
Gretchen: What's that?
Lauren: Is that the "is the present king of France bald" wouldn't have worked in the time that Pride and Prejudice was written, because it was written, like, a decade after the monarchy collapsed.
Gretchen: Oh no! Then you have to say, like, "Is the present king of France headless?" It's true, like, the day after.
Lauren: "Is the present king of France Napoleon?" No, only recently. Because I was, like, it would have been so great if we could have had: "Is the present King of France bald?" completely collapses now; at the time of Elizabeth and Darcy, totally would have held, but alas, no.
Gretchen: Ahh. So it still had this weird presupposition for them.
Lauren: We haven't had a present king of France for quite a while!
Gretchen: But it's not just – so, a lot of the examples we've been using so far have been with names of people and names of roles that people have, which is something that you can presuppose.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: But you can also do it with other kinds of words, not just names. One example that I really like is somebody on Tumblr, quite a while back, because I was looking through my presuppositions tag, asked me if I could recommend my favourite etymological dictionary. Lauren, what's your favourite etymological dictionary?
Lauren: My favourite etymological – this is, like, such a linguist question, isn't it? My favourite etymological dictionary. A dictionary that is just etymologies? I mean, obviously Etymonline.
Gretchen: But is it your favourite?
Lauren: I mean, I said "obviously" because it's like the only one.
Gretchen: I know!
Lauren: I mean, the Oxford English Dictionary does some etymology, and some of the other ones...
Gretchen: They do some etymologies, but it's often behind a paywall.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Yeah, so when I replied to this at the time, I was like, "Well, I don't have a favourite, I just have one. It's Etymonline, you should go read it."
Lauren: It's really nice to not have to make choices in life.
Gretchen: You know, "There's one that's online that's good that you should check." Or I think maybe they asked "some of your favourite etymological dictionaries"? And I was like, "There's... there's just this one." This was a joke that I used to play with my siblings, 'cause I'd be like, "You're my favourite brother! You're my favourite sister!" when I was growing up. I only have one of each.
Lauren: Yeah, it is a good – it's like a top Mother's Day card: "To my favourite mother."
Gretchen: Yeah. If you actually have two mothers for some reason, that's really mean, but...
Lauren: Yeah, true.
Gretchen: When you only have the one, it's just clever.
Lauren: Your birth mother is sitting there crying while your stepmum is, like, really smug.
Gretchen: Yeah, don't actually do this if you have multiple mothers.
Lauren: Don't do this if you have more than one mother, but if you're conveniently single-mothered, as I am – convenient for the sake of this joke – that's pretty good.
Gretchen: Yeah! So you can pull the "favourite X."
Lauren: What's your favourite theory about how language determines thought?
Gretchen: It's my least favourite theory!
Lauren: Kind of backs you into a corner there.
Gretchen: You know, if you're the only person in a race it's like, you came first in the marathon that I had in my backyard ten minutes ago! That no one else ran in!
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: But you came first! Good job!
Lauren: It's a good way to talk yourself up.
Gretchen: Yeah. I'm my favourite person in my apartment right now, yeah! Motivational self-help talk for presuppositions!
Lauren: Aww! There are other ways in which presuppositions are really just an excuse to talk about great strategies for irritating siblings. And one set of those is including the use of "stop."
Gretchen: Mmm.
Lauren: So, the classic "stop hitting yourself" presupposes that you chose to start hitting yourself.
Gretchen: So this is the classic thing where you go to your sibling and you make their own hand hit them?
Lauren: You pick up someone else's hand and use it to hit them, which, like, makes – I'm really glad that you also agree that this is the thing that you do.
Gretchen: Oh yeah, very much!
Lauren: 'Cause, like, I don't want to sound like the person that's the aggressive sibling.
Gretchen: I mean, I obviously, personally never did this.
Lauren: Mm-hmm, yes, it was your favourite younger brother who would do it all the time.
Gretchen: I have witnessed this happening among hypothetical siblings that may or may not be mine. "Stop hitting yourself" or you can be like, "Stop hitting me!" and then you can try to bring the wrath of your parents down on the sibling, even if they weren't actually hitting you.
Lauren: Or one that I get asked all the time, which is like, "When did you stop eating meat?" As a vegetarian, it's a topic that I don't give much thought to, but other people are really interested in.
Gretchen: Right, so if you've been vegetarian your entire life, then it's like, "Well, I didn't stop because I didn't start."
Lauren: Yeah, it presupposes –
Gretchen: Have you?
Lauren: See? There you go, you're really interested now, aren't you, in how long I've been a vegetarian.
Gretchen: Ah, no. The other classic example of ones that assume an emotional valence towards a situation – so if you have something like "how are you coping with your thesis?"
Lauren: Augh.
Gretchen: You're like, "Actually, I'm enjoying it!" or "Actually, it's been going pretty well these days!"
Lauren: Ahh, I finished mine, like, five years ago and I still get an automatic twinge just hearing you ask that question. But yeah, there were times when –
Gretchen: I thought you were gonna say you finished yours five years ago and people still ask you that question.
Lauren: No. But people would ask you. And some months you'd be having a really good month, things were under control, and you'd be like, "Well, I'm coping fine! It's all good." But you can't ever ask this question, like, neutrally or positively, you have to presuppose that things aren't optimal because it's a stressful experience.
Gretchen: I get asked this question about my hair, because I have very curly hair, and people say, "How do you deal with your hair? How do you manage your hair?" And I'm like, excuse me! I like my hair, I resent that it has to be a thing to be dealt with!
Lauren: "How do you deal with the burden of your hair?"
Gretchen: "How do you keep yourself from murdering your hair?" Like... no!
Lauren: So, I think we've declared those as the Annoying Youngest Sibling paradigm of questions.
Gretchen: I think this fits very well with our overall Pride and Prejudice theme that has appeared for this episode.
Lauren: Yup, yes. Definitely.
Gretchen: There are definitely some younger siblings in Pride and Prejudice!
Lauren: I'm gonna go out on a limb and say some annoying younger siblings in Pride and Prejudice.
Gretchen: I think that could be said!
Lauren: Yeah. So that's that set of that class of words.
Gretchen: And there's also a set around the number of times you've been doing something. So if you say, you know, if someone else is getting up and going to the kitchen and you're like, "I'll have some water, too!" It's like excuse me, I wasn't planning on bringing you water!
Lauren: "Oh, I'd love some of those biscuits if you're opening the packet!"
Gretchen: It's like, I wasn't... I wasn't opening that. Or, "Since you're better at mowing the lawn, I'll just let you do it!"
Lauren: Yeah. Presupposes that you're better at mowing the lawn.
Gretchen: Or just because I'm smarter than you doesn't mean that you couldn't do...
Lauren: That one you have to use with younger siblings all the time.
Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, you're contractually obligated.
Lauren: Yeah, so I guess they also fit in with the Annoying Youngest Sibling theme.
Gretchen: I mean, older siblings – I feel like I should admit as an oldest sibling – can also, presumably, be annoying.
Lauren: I wouldn't know!
Gretchen: The other ones that I really like are questions like "Why is Darcy such a jerk?"
Lauren: I love that it's just like there's no question that he is a jerk, because we're getting straight to understanding the reason for it.
Gretchen: Yeah, or, like, at the end of the book – spoiler alert – when Lizzie finally gets engaged to Darcy –
Lauren: Whaaat!
Gretchen: "Why did you get engaged Darcy when he's such a jerk?"
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: "Why would you want to get engaged to such a jerk?" presupposes that he's still acting in his, like, jerky behaviour from the beginning of the book.
Lauren: Yeah. I think of "why" questions as, like, if presupposition is about bringing baggage in, then using a "why" question is about bringing really space-efficient baggage? Like you just fit so much baggage in so efficiently with a question presupposition.
Gretchen: I think the most epic example of that that I found when I was researching this was a study from one of those, like, Psychology Today kind of journals, you know, pop science things, and the question that they had in their headline was "Why do people want to eat babies?"
Lauren: Now, you messaged this to me with no context.
Gretchen: I'm sorry!
Lauren: And I really did not know how to answer that.
Gretchen: Sorry! I feel like I need to clear up for the record that I do not want to eat babies!
Lauren: It's funny in retrospect now that I know that you were sending it to me for the episode, but why do people write headlines like "Why do people want to eat babies?"
Gretchen: I mean, it got our attention!
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Unfortunately, I tried to click on the study, and the link was from ages ago and it doesn't work anymore.
Lauren: Oh no, so we'll never know! We'll never know.
Gretchen: So we'll never know. I think this refers to when you have a baby – people do say this – like, "Oh, I just want to, like, omnomnom it all the way up!" and they kind of, like, nibble on it, but not with your teeth?!
Lauren: Oh, right.
Gretchen: I've seen people do this with babies.
Lauren: Yeah, okay.
Gretchen: But not in like a consuming-eat sort of way, just in like a "making the mouth movements at" sort of way.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: I hope this is the case, because I don't want to discover some sort of, like, weird thing that apparently is so well-known you can put it in a headline.
Lauren: So the examples we've been giving might give you the impression that there's just a specific set of words that we use to construct presuppositions. And that's true, we have a Wikipedia article that has a list of words that trigger presupposition in this way, but it's not just specific words. It's also words in particular contexts.
Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. One of my favourite – and by "favourite" I mean least favourite – examples of this is when certain parents, disproportionately male parents, get referred to as "babysitting" when they're taking care of their own children.
Lauren: Oh, this happened when – and I'm not gonna link to any of them, because I refuse to do any of them dignity – but there was a massive furore because when Serena Williams went back to playing tennis, her husband sat by the court looking after their child while she did her job.
Gretchen: Mm-hmm.
Lauren: And everyone was like, "Oh, it's so cute! He's babysitting while she goes back..." But it's like he's not babysitting, it's his own freakin' kid, what do you mean?
Gretchen: Yeah!
Lauren: "Babysitting" presupposes that you're looking after someone else's child, usually for some kind of financial gain.
Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. And if it's your own child, like, hopefully your partner isn't paying you to look after your own child, that would be –
Lauren: That would be your own personal arrangement, whatever.
Gretchen: But generally it's the case that people are taking care of their own children as co-parents and, you know, it gets referred to as babysitting.
Lauren: Yeah. So in this case it's this word, babysitting, but used in a particular context presupposes something that doesn't quite gel with it.
Gretchen: Yeah. The other example that we encounter a lot for this is when certain varieties of English, or varieties of a particular language, get referred to as "having an accent," or "losing an accent," or "accented," or "accent-less," which presupposes that there is some variety of English that isn't an accent. Everything's an accent.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: There isn't one neutral version of English that is the zero centre.
Lauren: Even though our default assumption is that we're the ones that don't have an accent. Gretchen, you have an accent, but I don't.
Gretchen: No, no, I'm the one that doesn't have an accent, you have an accent.
Lauren: Ahh, what a pickle we've put ourselves in!
Gretchen: I really enjoy describing – partly because you can sometimes do this to play with people's expectations, like if you're talking to somebody and you can tell that they think of themselves as, you know, "Oh, I've got this very standard American accent or British accent" to be like, "No, no, you're the accented one. Canadian English is just the normal one, I don't know what you're talking about."
Lauren: Yeah, kind of flip their presupposition back on them.
Gretchen: Yeah! But at the same time, I know that the accent that I have within Canadian English is considered "less accented" than other varieties, so I don't wanna do that when it's not flipping the script.
Lauren: We found some more great examples in the wild of presuppositions, but I'll let you decide which one you want to share first.
Gretchen: So, the way that I found these is I did a search on Twitter for "presupposition" and I filtered it by only people that I follow? And I went back, like, eight years to all these linguists that didn't know that their tweets from, like, 2011 –
Lauren: Were gonna be used as –
Gretchen: Where they were like, "Huh, look at this example of a presupposition!" Because it turns out I haven't blogged about this very much.
Lauren: So thank you to linguists of Twitter.
Gretchen: Thank you to linguists of Twitter. Thanks to Lynne Murphy, who tweeted not so long ago an example which went "Which Americanisms make you wince?" This is from a British newspaper, which presupposes that some Americanisms make you wince, or similar examples like "What are your linguistic pet peeves?" or "Which words should be banished?" presupposes that some words should be banished and that people have linguistic pet peeves, when this is also something that is not necessary and is not something that should be presupposed.
Lauren: Emily Bender on Twitter shared a quote and then kind of deconstructed the presupposition in it. The quote was: "Given that ours is a scientific discipline, you must be careful to ground your argument in previous research." And Emily Bender's like, "Well, do they imagine that the disciplines outside the sciences don't ground their research in previous work?"
Gretchen: Ooh!
Lauren: That, like, anything that's not a hard science just fabricates things anew every time without any reference to what goes ahead?
Gretchen: Time doesn't exist except for science-science!
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: I don't know what you're talking about. The only area that has time is science. Humanities and social sciences just exist in this non-time-bound sphere.
Lauren: I feel like this is a good time to send people back to the episode about existing in time as a human.
Gretchen: That's true, we did a solstice episode about existing in time. Possibly one of my favourite examples, which comes from a non-linguist, saying, "As his name is not Biggest Bird, we are to understand that Sesame Street is home to at least one, perhaps more, truly immense, unseen birds."
Lauren: I feel like so much of our discussion so far has been, like, wow, look at all this extra baggage you get and you don't realise it, and I feel like this person is just trying to shove more baggage in than is possible with this example.
Gretchen: This is the equivalent of, like, sitting on your suitcase, trying to jam it close.
Lauren: How much more presupposition can I try and pretend is in this name?
Gretchen: I mean, I think there's a genuine example beyond the facetious example where if you say something is bigger, it's implying that it's also not the biggest.
Lauren: So, like, "something's bigger than Texas" doesn't presuppose that there could be something that is even bigger again.
Gretchen: Yeah, so it's a stretch, but it's a funny stretch. Or a more mundane example from Sherry Yong Chen on Twitter where she posted a photo of "Welcome Back" on this sign of a neighbourhood pub? Which was clearly trying to presuppose that you had already been there, you know, so that they could welcome you back as like a "we're part of a neighbourhood" sort of thing.
Lauren: And I think it's worth taking – like, we've been giving some very constructed examples and I think the reason that people keep coming back to the "present king of France" example, et cetera, is that they're very clean and clinical and easy to dissect what's happening. But the reality is we use presupposition to get through conversation every day of our lives.
Gretchen: Absolutely.
Lauren: You know, if we're talking about Emily Bender, you presuppose that that is the Emily Bender that we both know, or that will be locate-able in the show notes of the show, and if I had to say, every time, "Emily Bender, who's a computational linguist, who you may know from Twitter," like, that's just gonna get a very tedious conversation.
Gretchen: Like, a person that I know who is a person!
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Who's alive!
Lauren: And if I had to stop you every time and be like, "Whoa, you have a sister?" Like, that's gonna get tedious.
Gretchen: Yeah, normally we're pretty seamless about this, especially introducing random family members, or introducing, you know, if I say, "Oh, I can't chat with you right now, I've got to go pick up my dog from the vet," you can accept that even if you don't know that I have a dog (I don't have a dog). But this is the example.
Lauren: I was like, "You have a dog?! This is news to me, Gretchen!"
Gretchen: You've been to my place, you've seen I don't have a dog!
Lauren: Yeah. But presupposition works in a way that it's like, conversation is busy. The fact that I have a dog is not the important thing, it's the fact that I can't talk to you right now, that's the important thing, so let's just go with it.
Gretchen: Yeah, you just kind of quietly update your mental ledger for which bits of baggage are being hung on to.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: A really interesting example of this comes from a Language Log post from a couple years ago by Julie Sedivy, and she talks about boasting through presuppositions?
Lauren: Mmm!
Gretchen: And she gives the example of a politician who was trying to find a way to integrate into his conversation, like, "Look, I created 7 million jobs!" without saying "I've created 7 million jobs and you all need to know about it."
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And eventually what the advisers came to was to do that boast through presuppositions. So saying something like, "The 7 million jobs we've created won't be much use if we can't find educated people to fill them. That's why I want to create a tax reduction for college tuition to help kids go to college to take those jobs."
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And so you get the 7 million jobs in there, that we've created, but you don't have to say, "We've created 7 million jobs! You should definitely believe us when we say this."
Lauren: And it gives it, like, solidity, 'cause you're not jamming it in as new information, you're treating it – and the sneaky thing about presuppositions is that they're in that part of the sentence that we treat as old information or existing information.
Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. So in the comments on that post, there's a woman saying that she's found this to be really effective for introducing people to the idea that she's a lesbian, because she just says, you know, "my wife." "Oh, my wife would kill me if I watched that new episode of Torchwood without her! Have you seen it?" And then people just have to add the "my wife" to the background information, and she finds it's less confrontational, makes for an easier conversation, than saying "I have a wife, how do you feel about that?"
Lauren: Yep, very handy.
Gretchen: Yeah, so presuppositions can communicate things about social norms as well. And one really interesting example of how we seamlessly update our information via presuppositions comes from forensic linguistics, actually.
Lauren: Oh, that's cool!
Gretchen: Yeah! So this is when you use linguistics in a courtroom to determine how people can give evidence and be asked questions and all sorts of things. And in this particular example – so it's a study by a memory scientist called Elizabeth Loftus – they show people videos of car crashes, and then they'd ask them questions about what they'd seen. Sometimes they'd ask them questions in two stages, or they'd ask them certain questions that had presuppositions in them. So they asked them, "Do you remember seeing the stop sign?" people would be like, "Yeah!" or "Sure, maybe." They answer "yes" at a higher rate than the people who are asked "Do you remember seeing a stop sign?" which is not a presupposition.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: There is an updated version of the study that was recently done in French by a linguist who I know named Elizabeth Allyn Smith at the University of Quebec at Montreal. And so she made a video and played it for Montrealers which again, you know, showed a robbery. So she had them fill out a questionnaire. The first questionnaire was things like, "Did you see a trash can?" or "the yellow trash can" or "the green trash can." And the trash can was actually yellow.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And then a week later she had them come in and say, "What colour was the trash can?" and they could select green or yellow.
Lauren: Uh-huh.
Gretchen: And so in the cases where – so sometimes they got no extra presupposition information, sometimes they got the correct presupposition information, and sometimes they got incorrect presupposition information.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And she found that people would give the incorrect answer! They'd say it was green when it was actually yellow when they'd had this type of presupposition, but they did so at slightly different rates than the English speakers did in the same studies.
Lauren: Huh!
Gretchen: So they were less likely to be influenced when you added true information, but they were more likely to be influenced when you added false information.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: Than the English-speakers. And of course there's a bunch of stuff that could lead to this, and I think she's planning follow-up studies to figure out exactly which factors affected this, it might have been French or English, it might have been other differences in the paradigm of the study. But think about, like, some of this can even differ cross-linguistically how much you update the information that you think is in the world based on a presupposition.
Lauren: Which has massive implications for how people are cross-examined in court, right?
Gretchen: Absolutely.
Lauren: Like if you squeeze a whole bunch of presuppositions into questions, you could potentially confuse people's ideas of what happened.
Gretchen: And if you feed someone false information in presuppositions and they agree to it, and then they give false answers later and you can prove that they gave false answers, you can use that to discredit a witness.
Lauren: Mmm. That's... mean.
Gretchen: Who maybe was just doing what we do in conversation all the time.
[Music]
Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get scarves with the International Phonetic Alphabet or tree diagrams on them and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com.
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Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire, our editorial producer is Emily, and our production assistant is Celine. And our music is by The Triangles.
Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What's the difference between "thinking" and "knowing"? What rules do we follow for adjusting our conversational worlds? In this week's episode, we delve into the semantics and pragmatics of presuppositions: which words come equipped with them, how presuppositions depend on the situation and our mental worlds, and what antipresuppositions can tell us about the mechanics of interpreting sentences.
Looking forward to hearing what people have to say! ^_^
