Discussions |
On Hawthorne and Magidor on Assertion, Context, and Epistemic Accessibility
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 USA
| Abstract |
|---|
Hawthorne and Magidor's criticisms of the model of presupposition and assertion that I have used and defended are all based on a rejection of some transparency or introspection of assumptions about speaker presupposition. This response to those criticisms aims first to clarify, and then to defend, the required transparency assumptions. It is argued, first, that if the assumptions are properly understood, some prima facie problems for them do not apply, second, that rejecting the assumptions has intuitively implausible consequences, and third, that the margin of error argument against the principle of positive introspection has a false premiss. The paper concludes with a response to a criticism of what Hawthorne and Magidor call the uniformity principle that is used in the model to explain some pragmatic phenomena.