Common Ground or Conceptual Reframing? A Study of the Common Elements in Conflicting Positions in French Interactions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 132

Chapter 8
Common Ground or Conceptual Reframing?
A Study of the Common Elements in Conflicting
Positions in French Interactions

Alfredo M. Lescano

8.1 The Notion of “Common Ground”

According to Stalnaker, the common ground of an interaction is the set of pieces of
information that the participants in an interaction accept as shared belief (Stalnaker
2002 ).
It is common ground that ® in a group if all members accept (for the purpose of the
conversation) that ® , and all believe that all accept that ® , and all believe that all believe
that all accept that ® ,etc.
(Stalnaker 2002 : 716)

In this formulation, ® stands for a piece of information (a proposition), say
an objective description of a state of affairs towards which a speaker may have
a certain attitude, such as believing in its truth or falsehood. Common ground is
based on the idea that meaning consists ultimately in pieces of information; that is
why the notion of common ground makes sense from an informational/descriptive
perspective, where speakers exchange descriptions of states of affairs (i.e. pieces
of information) together with their psychological attitudes towards them. This is
one of the assumptions that I question. But first of all, it must be made clear
that the notion of common ground can be treated independently from another
notion which is usually associated with it, the notion of presupposition. In fact, the
notion of common ground was created by Stalnaker to give a pragmatic account of
presupposition (or we should say “the phenomena usually called presupposition ”).
The most unequivocal example of presupposition may be presented by saying that
the proposition [There is a unique king of France] is presupposed by the sentence