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“The present king of France is bald”. Contrary to Strawson ( 1950 ), who, like Frege
( 1892 ), treated the use of sentences containing false presuppositions as spurious
(the truth of the presupposition being a condition for the sentence to be either
true or false), Stalnaker suggests that presupposition is not a problem of how the
truth value of the presupposition affects that of the sentence, but rather a problem
of the speakers' attitude towards information (Stalnaker 1973 , 1996 , 2002 ). In
Stalnaker's view, presuppositions must be explained by observing what speakers
take for granted when using a sentence, which implies that a sentence can have
a truth value even if its presuppositions are false. Thus, a notion like “common
ground” was necessary in order to theorise the pragmatic principles governing
presupposition in conversation. Stalnaker suggests that to presuppose that ® is to
believe that ® belongs to the common ground of the interaction. Yet, if we admit that
in a given interaction, the parties involved have a particular attitude, like “to accept
as shared beliefs”, towards a particular set of pieces of information, it doesn't seem
incoherent to suppose that presupposition is not the only way to denote that attitude.
Arguably, a sentence like We both believe that ® would explicitly accomplish that
task without presupposing that ® . This is the way in which we will understand
“common ground” in this work.
In the next sections, I will present some descriptive problems with the idea that
what is presented as “shared” has something to do with pieces of information and
hence with common ground. But, of course, these are not very original claims; I
am preceded by a long and strong tradition of non-truth-conditional semantics or
pragmatics. However, what I believe is that it is possible to allow a different kind
of description of the “shared” elements of an interaction by focusing on the way
elements of content (in my terminology, “concepts”) are related. Furthermore, I
will try to show that this approach, which rests upon a conception of meaning as
socially dependent connections of linguistic forms rather than as individual mental
states, can be useful to identify speakers' strategies to gain the upper hand in a
discursive conflict. In particular, we will try to characterise the strategy that consists
in modifying the interpretation of the opponent's point of view.
8.2
The Common Ground of a Conflicting Interaction
The first interaction we will analyse is an excerpt from a political debate. In 2007,
the two main candidates in the presidential elections in France were confronted in a
televised debate. Nicolas Sarkozy, from a right wing party (UMP), had been Interior
Minister during the period that was just coming to an end. Segolène Royal, from
the French Socialist Party, was the challenger, and was at that time in an excellent
position according to the opinion polls—many people had the impression that her
bad performance in the forthcoming elections was linked to her bad performance as
an orator in precisely this debate, from which we analyse the following excerpt:
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