Background Relevance

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Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier’s archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.elsevier.com/authorsrights Author's personal copy Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics 59 (2013) 178--189 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Background relevance Louis de Saussure * University of Neuchâtel, Linguistique et analyse du discours, Espace Louis Agassiz 1, CH 2000 Neuchâtel, Switzerland Received 16 May 2012; received in revised form 8 August 2013; accepted 13 August 2013 Abstract This paper extends the notion of presupposition to inferences providing grounds for relevance or meaningfulness; it is claimed that such presuppositions get accommodated quite in the same way as presuppositions proper, and that they have a particular efficiency in persuasive situations. It is argued that they bypass controls of relevance and that they relate to a wider set of cognitive processes which concern various kinds of old or given knowledge. Their link with other cognitive biases is studied. It is suggested that their persuasive power is tied to the fact that given and allegedly given information tend to be processed the same way. © 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V. Keywords: Discursive presuppositions; Presupposition accommodation; Persuasion; Relevance; Background 1. Introduction This paper considers the persuasive effectiveness of what is presented by speakers as background information, i.e. old, previous, or given (as van der Sandt, 1992 puts it) information. We suggest the existence of a ‘presuppositional bias’ linked to a heuristics (in the tradition initiated by Tversky and Kahneman, 1974) which is activated when a piece of information is considered as given: such content does not attract full attention and will only undergo superficial processing, for the simple reason that if it is a preexisting belief, then it has already been treated and thus needs not be treated again. This bias favours successful manufacture of consent when unjustified accommodation of presupposition occurs, i.e. when the incorporation of new information is achieved by means normally dedicated to process given information. We suggest that the notion of presupposition accommodation can be extended to elements in the background which are not triggered linguistically and which emerge only as to provide basic motivations to ensure the relevance of the utterance. In ordinary situations of communication, expectedly, cognition reacts to presuppositional inconsistencies to some degree. But it does so to some degree only, as Lewis (1979) points out. As a consequence, it does happen that background information gets spontaneously accommodated even when it is inconsistent with otherwise accessible knowledge. We develop in this paper a tentative cognitive account of these cases where presupposition accommodation, extended to other notions than what is usually called presupposition occurs unduly in relation with persuasive attempts.1 In section 2, we will consider in particular specific types of contents which share properties with both (conversational) implicatures and presuppositions proper (often thought of as types of implicatures) without belonging clearly to one of * Tel.: +41 32 718 18 07. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1 Although we are heading towards a psychological-cognitive account of persuasion with presuppositions, Macagno (2012:248) rightfully notes that this process can also be addressed within theories of argumentation. He says: ‘‘presuppositions can be analysed from an argumentative point of view as the result and the triggers of processes of reasoning that can and need to be assessed. Interpreting presuppositions in terms of reasoning can explain why presupposing can be used to deceive, hide, or mislead the interlocutor, and why some uses of the so-called emotive, loaded or slanted words can be extremely powerful instruments’’. 0378-2166/$ -- see front matter © 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.08.009 Author's personal copy L. de Saussure / Journal of Pragmatics 59 (2013) 178--189 179 these two categories. We name them discursive presuppositions. Then we discuss pragmatic accommodation of presuppositions (section 3), before we examine why they bypass controls of relevance (section 4) and may serve persuasive and potentially deceptive aims when they convey hidden background assertions (section 5). 2. Discursive presuppositions 2.1. The notion Various notions of presupposition acting at the level of discourse are recognized in the literature. Felicity conditions, being preconditions to the success of speech acts, can arguably be considered as a type of presupposed information. Presumptions about shared knowledge, without which meaningfulness cannot occur, can also be named ‘presuppositions’ (as Macagno, 2012 suggests). A notion of weak presupposition lato sensu is also introduced by Rigotti and Rocci (2001); they suggest that the latter play a crucial role in establishing the congruity of information in discursive contexts (see also Rocci, 2005; van Dijk, 2011). Maybe, calling such elements presuppositions is possible only with a lay, not a technical, understanding of the term. However let us consider the intuition that these things, as they all belong to the background, and are all useful to understanding, have something in common with presuppositions in the technical sense. In the course of this article, we will attempt at identifying such presuppositions with a focus on the notion of relevance (in the continuation of Simons, 2005) before we elaborate on the idea that presuppositions both in the classical sense and in the discursive lato-sensu sense of ‘preconditions for relevance and meaningfulness’ share specific persuasive properties by means of accommodation. The notion of ‘presupposition’ has some fuzziness in the literature as soon as one considers cases where there is no obvious linguistic trigger (and when it is not based on a conversational implicature; see Gazdar, 1979), that is, cases where a pragmatic inference is mandatory in order to make full sense of the utterance. Crucially, such an inference shares properties with presuppositions stricto sensu. These inferences are necessary prerequisites without which the utterance could still have a (truth-conditional/explicit) meaning but no relevance. At the same time such pieces of information are not exhibited by the Speaker as what she intends to communicate. In other words, these inferences play a role not in (truthconditional/explicit) meaning (so that the utterance would still have a clear meaning without them) but at the contextual level, because without them the utterance would be incongruous with regard to the context, and thus irrelevant. The utterance would mean something, but the speech act would be absurd. Such inferences are actually about ‘given’ information. As such, they are not conversational implicatures in the classical sense, i.e. they are not what the Speaker intends to communicate in saying the utterance. For example, one may wonder about the exact status of the inferences (1a--1c) on the basis of utterances (1), or (2a-2c) on the basis of (2): (1) (1a) (1b) (2) (2a) (2b) (2c) We need to shut the door / Shut the door! The fact that the door is open is undesirable in the present circumstances. There is too much noise / it’s cold / we have to keep some privacy. . . Guns are not permitted in this area. Guns could be permitted in this area. Guns may be permitted in other public areas Guns are undesirable / dangerous / . . . if carried in this area The speech acts in (1) and (2) involve a number of preconditions that justify their occurrence in discourse. (1a) is in no way a presupposition in the usual sense, since it is not inferred on the basis of lexical or sentence meaning, nor does it enter directly in the calculation of meaning: the actual and known conditions of the world don’t affect sentence meaning except for disambiguation and reference. The fact that the opened door is a desirable or undesirable state of affairs doesn’t change reference assignment or potential sentence ambiguity. Such inferences are recovered as encyclopaedic knowledge about what justifies a request of this sort in an interaction. (1b) -- there is noise etc. -- is inferred (if at all) on similar bases but even more remotely, because it concerns the reasons underlying (1a), itself a background assumption for (1). Example (2), similarly, doesn’t need anything like (2a) to (2c) in order to have a full-fledged meaning. Normally, (2) doesn’t serve at all to communicate contents such as (2a--c), but rather simply to communicate that guns are forbidden at a given place. Such elements are implicatures of a certain kind (they are pragmatic inferences in the full sense) but they do share important properties with presuppositions proper (which are often also considered implicatures of a particular kind). Rather than thinking about them in terms of preconditions to speech acts, we suggest that these inferences are needed in order to make sense of the intention of the Speaker, which occurs in a certain world with certain ontological properties (at least a world so represented in the mind of the addressee). A sign like (2), if posted at the University of Neuchâtel, would still carry the same meaning, i.e. that guns are not allowed here, and certainly the speech Author's personal copy 180 L. de Saussure / Journal of Pragmatics 59 (2013) 178--189 act would succeed in enforcing the ban (even though it would not be felicitous in the Searlian sense which involves a notion of the situation not being obvious to the Hearer). However it would be absurd, since guns are not permitted anywhere in this country. Notions such as those in (1a--1b) and (2a--2c) are preliminary basis without which (1) or (2) would not be able to meet the Hearer’s expectations about a rational communicative act (or the presumption of relevance in Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance theory).2 We will call such elements discursive presuppositions (henceforth DP). In many situations, such elements are already known by the Interlocutor at speech time and thus actually belong to his background knowledge. That the Speaker anticipates the belonging of an assumption in the Hearer’s background may be seen as evidence for the existence of a common ground on which the communication is built (cf. Clark et al., 1983). Sharing background information is a condition for the predictability of the meanings intended by our interlocutors, as it conditions the added value attached to new information.3 Shared background is the necessary basis for a number of abilities and attitudes, including that of saving the effort of constantly re-establishing the grounds on which our thoughts are elaborated and communicated. DPs are those pieces of background knowledge which are not necessary for the recovery of a meaning proper but are basic conditions for relevance and meaningfulness. Sperber and Wilson suggest that background information needs not be presupposed (and foreground information needs not be new), and thus that the notions of ‘background’ and ‘foreground’ are not linguistic. On the contrary, they suggest, it’s the Hearer’s search for relevance which leads him to backgrounding or foregrounding various pieces of information. Background information, they say, is information ‘‘that contributes only indirectly to relevance, by reducing the processing efforts required’’ (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:217). In our understanding, this does not entail that the Speaker cannot use linguistic means to communicate that she holds a piece of information as background -- it is inscribed in the semantics of presuppositional triggers -- and also pragmatic means, when she can anticipate that some notions necessary for making sense of her utterance have to be taken for granted by a reasonable interlocutor. This is what goes on, we suggest, with discursive presuppositions, but of course the fact that presuppositions are not always backgrounded complicates the picture even more. 2.2. Discursive presuppositions vis-à-vis other types of content Parts of the background are simply retrieved by presuppositions in order to provide the appropriate context when processing the new information provided by the utterance. Because under certain conditions presuppositions don’t project, scholars such as Carston (1998) assume that they are pragmatic in nature and thus generated in context rather than produced by default and only cancelled under specific conditions. Thus, even in the presence of a linguistic item that triggers a presupposition, there is an old dispute whether it should be regarded as a default semantic content that comes up together with the trigger and its arguments, or on the contrary the result of an inferential process taking place on the basis of pragmatic principles. One of the key reasons for this hesitation is that in the classical views (typically Heim, 1983, or van der Sandt, 1992, but the literature on the topic is overwhelming), it is assumed that presuppositions are both bound to coded semantic material (the ‘triggers’) and to anaphora resolution (a domain diversely approached by semantic and pragmatic theories), which is in turn subject to pragmatic accommodation. It is a commonality to identify three major types of contents: entailments, implicatures and presuppositions. Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) Relevance theory presents a different picture where there is no such things as truth-conditional/ what is said vs. non truth-conditional/what is implicated meaning à la Grice, but explicit and implicit layers of information which are retrieved pragmatically on the basis of an abstract form and general pragmatic principles, so that an assumption emerges about the meaning intentions of the Speaker. What we call discursive presuppositions are nothing more, when we look at them with relevance-theoretic eyes, than specific implicatures which present themselves as a priori, given information that is necessarily retrieved in order to give a minimal rational ground for a Speaker to relevantly bring about a new information. Relevance theory might simply classify some DPs as weak implicatures, i.e. types of implicatures that do not constitute the primary informative content intended by the Speaker, or as implicated assumptions. We think it is not anecdotal that DPs are not a topic of interest for the Hearer, who takes them as given and not as new, and we defend the view that this is a sufficient reason for considering them as a separate type. The types of contents conveyed by an utterance can be distinguished with two criteria: (i) whether the Speaker overtly intends to render manifest the considered content, and (ii) whether the considered content is linguistically and semantically determined or not. These two criteria lead actually to four types of contents, one of which being what we call DPs: 2 Simons (2005) suggests that presuppositions, both in the classical sense and in that of implicated assumptions, serve as ‘relevance establishers’. 3 The division between given and new information is admitted as cognitively relevant at least since the seminal works by Haviland and Clark (1974). Author's personal copy L. de Saussure / Journal of Pragmatics 59 (2013) 178--189 181 (1) Entailments: they are overtly intended as manifest contents and are linguistically determined (‘John killed Bill’ entails that Bill is dead, which is manifest and semantically determined as a part of the meaning of kill). (2) Implicatures (conversational): they are overtly intended as manifest contents but are pragmatically determined in context (‘John killed Bill’ may implicate that John is a bandit or a courageous hero depending on the circumstances and whether the properties of John are part of what the conversation is about or not). (3) Linguistically triggered presuppositions4: they are not overtly conveyed as manifest contents and they are linguistically determined (‘John regrets that P’ presupposes the truth of P but P is not what the Speaker intends to render manifest to the Hearer, at least not under usual conditions). (4) Discursive presuppositions (DP): they are not overtly conveyed as manifest contents and are pragmatically determined in context (that guns are permitted somewhere else in town is not the intended communicated meaning associated with the sign in (2) and is determined in the context by contextual pragmatic means only).5 Entailments and presuppositions will be analyzed by traditional approaches as truth-conditional meanings, whereas implicatures and DPs will be considered non-truth-conditional. Entailments and implicatures are overtly communicated as bearing the message intended by the Speaker. On the contrary, presuppositions of the two types are usually not -- except in cases where the presupposition is used in order to pass on a message relevant in its own right through accommodation, then with a specific attitude (presuppositions are not always background and can be sometimes relevant in their own right, in which case they are exploited pragmatically).6 In other words: usually, presuppositions are background information and as such, they are not overtly displayed as relevant. DP is a very special type: it is covertly conveyed and however pragmatically inferred in cases when it is not straightaway accessible in salient knowledge. It is derived by the Hearer, if not directly available, in order to make sense of the utterance’s meaning in a specific context. Similarly to presuppositions proper, DPs are subject to contextual accommodation. DPs can be seen as the type of implicatures which provide specifically given information. They differ from implicatures in the more classical sense of conversational implicatures in that they are about old and not about new information and do not form Speaker meaning. We furthermore underline that neither presuppositions nor DPs are implicit premises that normally enter in the derivation of implicatures; for example, John stopped smoking does not normally convey implicatures related to John’s previous smoking (unless an exploitation of presuppositions for specific reasons), but to John’s actual non-smoking; similarly, Guns are not permitted in this area do not (unless in a specific context which we cannot see in the case of a posted sign) convey implicatures about guns being allowed elsewhere. DPs are both related to and different from entailments, (conversational) implicatures and presuppositions proper. We agree with Simons (2006:4) who explains that ‘‘to say that presuppositions are conversational inferences is not to identify them with conversational implicatures’’, if one distinguishes between what a speaker conveys as her informative intention and what comes together with it but without being a part of it. This being said, we emphasize that DPs share a number of key properties with linguistically determined presuppositions. This is why we will examine cases concerning both types further down. From the point of view of meaning itself, presuppositions proper must be true for the utterance to possibly be true or false, thus to make any sense, regardless of whether they are understood as triggered lexically or as part of the contextual environment which forms the Speaker’s background and about which the proposition uttered applies as a truth-value function (as with pragmatic presuppositions, as in Stalnaker, 1974). From the point of view of meaningfulness and relevance, we shall say that DPs must be true for the utterance to possibly be relevant. 3. Presupposition accommodation: extending the paradigm It may happen that such elements are not actually present in the background at speech time but that they get incorporated through a process of accommodation. For example, if someone utters I can’t come to the meeting, I have to pick up my cat at the veterinarian, the Hearer might well learn something about the cat and incorporate this knowledge into 4 For the sake of the argument, we admit that even presuppositions which derive pragmatically from an item, ‘quasi-presuppositions’ in Schlenker’s (2008) terms, are of type 3. For example, John did not come late presupposes ‘weakly’, so to say, John came, on the basis of the lexical trigger late which is focused on (cf. Abrusan, 2013). 5 Kleiber (2012) distinguishes between présupposition-contenu (‘presupposition as content’) and présupposition-inférence (‘presupposition as inference’), however he suggests that these are related layers of information whereas we are talking here of separate elements. 6 For example, in the movie Che Guevara, when Fidel Castro decides to appoint Che Guevara ‘commandante’, he utters: Sign here, commandante, presupposing that the Hearer is a commandante, and therefore adding to the propositional meaning a particular notion, something like you are obviously a commandante. In such a case, the presupposition is accommodated with a special pragmatic effect, and the Speaker is not pretending that the information is held as true in the Hearer’s background (which can also happen for rhetorical reasons, politeness, etc.). Author's personal copy 182 L. de Saussure / Journal of Pragmatics 59 (2013) 178--189 his cognitive environment (example discussed further down).7 Roughly, presupposition accommodation happens when a proposition P which does not belong to the background is presented as a presupposition, with the consequence that P gets incorporated in the background, although ‘‘ceteris paribus and within certain limits’’ (Lewis, 1979:417). Presupposition accommodation is a useful and economical instrument of communication (Seuren, 2000; Stalnaker, 2002).8 Accommodation happens also, we claim, with DPs. For example, although (2) is not an utterance about guns being permitted elsewhere (it is an utterance about guns being forbidden somewhere), someone may learn that carrying a gun is permitted in some areas in the US by simply reading (2), which bears a restrictive indication of place. In such a case, the accommodation of a new belief in the addressee’s cognitive environment takes place, even though it is a pragmatic inference derived from the assumption that it would be uninformative, or little informative, to assert that something is forbidden somewhere if it is anyway forbidden everywhere. Background accommodation displays a very special property: the information conveyed will appear as old, given and thus not as relevant in its own right, that is, only possibly relevant in relation to other pieces of information. And it appears such to the Hearer even in some cases where information presented as backgroung is actually new and relevant. This raises an issue about persuasion. To take a real example, the U.S. National Rifle Association published in 1982 an advertisement showing a smiling kid holding a rifle with a text which reads (excerpt): ‘‘My Dad’s a member of the NRA and so am I because he says they need kids like me to grow up and keep shooting a safe sport’’.9 From this, the reader grasps a number of assumptions, including the presupposed ‘shooting is a safe sport’, triggered by the factive verb ‘keep’. A number of other propositions are conveyed without clear justification (notably that armed kids are a good thing for shooting safety), but for the whole advertisement to ‘make sense’, even before implicatures may be derived, a number of prerequisites have to be met, without which the utterance can still bear a clear meaning but can’t have relevance. Here, one gathers not only that it is allowed for a kid to be a NRA member, but also that the safety of shooting is a fatherly value, and in the end, that this and possibly other values are in need of protection and promotion. Such things are taken for granted in the advert -- whether the authors assume this legitimately and sincerely or not is another question -- and if they are not, these beliefs will tend to be implemented, depending on the awareness and critical scrutiny of the Hearer, through a kind of presupposition accommodation which is not directly tied to anaphora resolution of a linguistic trigger but to the pragmatic aim of making sense of an utterance in a wider context. It’s an accommodation of a discursive presupposition.10 Presupposition accommodations stricto sensu obtain pragmatically but operate on explicit meanings -- for example when anaphora resolution calls for the introduction of a referent previously not mentioned. Some accommodations are ‘‘pragmatically inappropriate’’, as von Fintel (2000:16) puts it, who discusses the pair of utterances (3) and (4), conveying presuppositions (3a) and (4a): (3) (3a) (4) (4a) I can’t come to the meeting -- I have to pick up my cat at the veterinarian. (Stalnaker, 1998) The Speaker has a cat. O Dad, I forgot to tell you that my fiancé and I are moving to Seattle next week. (von Fintel, 2000) The Speaker has a fiancé. A critical difference between (3) and (4) in the context where the presupposed information is not part of the Hearer’s background at speech time is that (3a) is -- ceteris paribus -- pragmatically ‘appropriate’ while (4a) is not.11 The intuitive argument is the following: in the circumstances, that the Speaker has a cat is of no pragmatic importance for the interlocutors at the moment of speech, while that a girl has a fiancé is an important information to a father and thus is not expected to be brought about by a presupposition accommodation. This is because, in our terms, a presupposition comes without it being identified as a relevant piece of information. A fine way of putting this is von Fintel’s (2000): ‘‘The common ground theory (. . .) says that one can presuppose p as long as it is assumed that the Hearer will not want to dispute p’’ (von Fintel, 2000:15).12 This is an important point, since it amounts to saying that adequately presupposing entails a prediction 7 Informative presuppositions, such as We regret that children cannot accompany their parents to commencement exercises (Karttunen, 1974), are not presupposition accommodations proper: it is rather about a pragmatic exploitation of a presupposition, the Speaker intending that her intention to communicate the presupposed content is recognized as new, not background information (with a diplomatic effect we can’t address here). 8 ‘‘Presuppositions (. . .) constitute an extremely powerful device for saving time and energy in linguistic communication’’, Seuren (2000:180). Stalnaker (2002:105) compares its usefulness with that of implicatures. 9 http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/national-rifle-association-ads-history. 10 On presupposition accommodation, see Thomason (1990), von Fintel (2008) and Thomason et al. (2006) for details, in particular in relation to pragmatic reasoning. 11 In the terms of Ducrot (1972:51), it is a ‘presuppositional coup’ (‘coup de force présuppositionnel’), 12 A position which anchors on the idea by Soames (1982) that presuppositions are held as uncontroversial. See von Fintel (2000, 2008) for a survey. Author's personal copy L. de Saussure / Journal of Pragmatics 59 (2013) 178--189 183 by the Speaker that the interlocutor has a certain attitude of ‘not being willing to dispute it’. We suggest that there are two necessary conditions for the pragmatic in/appropriateness of presupposition accommodation. (i) The first one is that the inappropriate accommodation of a presupposition, here for example (4a), contradicts an assumption strongly held by the Hearer (‘the speaker doesn’t have a fiancé’), whereas an appropriate accommodation of a presupposition, like (3a), introduces a new piece of information without inconsistency with previously held knowledge. That the Speaker does or doesn’t have a cat is out of the set of assumptions manifest to the Speaker before speech time, or, in other words, there is no previous belief about that cat in the Hearer’s cognitive environment (the Hearer is ‘agnostic’, von Fintel 2000:11). Thus there is no relevance in disputing the presupposition in (3a) whereas there is a possible matter of dispute in (4a) in usual circumstances. (ii) The second condition is that the accommodated presupposition is predicted by the Speaker to be relevant for the Hearer in the circumstances. It is for example predictable that it is relevant to a father that his daughter has a fiancé, whereas the fact that an employee has a cat bears, in principle, no relevance for the Hearer in the circumstances of an excuse for missing a meeting. Only the fact that there is a plausible event causing the Speaker not to come to the meeting has relevance, regardless of the nature of the cause itself. On the contrary, that the daughter has a fiancé has a very strong impact on family life and, expectedly, will trigger a great number of further inferences. DPs being pragmatic, they depend on context; therefore a proposition P may be conveyed, depending on various factors in the speech situation, either as a DP or as an implicature proper by means of the very same sentence. For example if I tell my kid that it is forbidden to play in the living room, he may think that I am implying that he can and should play elsewhere (implicature), or he can simply gather that other areas are available for play as a discursive presupposition. Implicatures in the restricted sense adopted here are related to the question in focus whereas DPs aren’t. Consider (5) and the possible inference (5a): (5) (5a) I’m taking the umbrella. It’s raining or rain is expected. (5a) can be brought to the consciousness of the Hearer as an implicature, in the circumstances where what is expected by the Hearer is a piece of information regarding the rain, not the umbrella. In such circumstances, the negative (6) will on the contrary serve to communicate It’s not raining: (50 ) I’m not taking the umbrella. But (5) can also be uttered to talk about the umbrella, not specifically about the rain. Then the Speaker takes (5a) as mutually manifest. In this case, we claim, the existence of rain is not the informative intention of the Speaker, which can be about many things: the whereabouts of the umbrella in the house, for example (we suppose here that there is only one umbrella in the house). The existence of the rain is then simply discursively presupposed. Furthermore, in this case, the negative (50 ) will certainly not cancel in any way the background information that it’s raining, but communicate about the availability of the umbrella. Therefore, if (5a) is discursively presupposed, it is not cancelled by (50 ), whereas if it functions as an implicature, it is. Moreover, both positive (5) and negative (50 ) are totally compatible with both possible backgrounds: rain and not-rain. Now, although (6) is compatible with the same background as (5) (rain), (50 ) seems unable to convey that content (there is rain) as an implicature (in standard contexts where one takes an umbrella iff rain is expected). In other words, (6) doesn’t seem to allow for the inference of an implicature that rain is the case (except of course in a weird context where one precisely doesn’t take an umbrella specifically when it’s raining). (5) and (50 ) are thus compatible with the same background assumptions, but they are not compatible with the same implicatures (ceteris paribus). We take this as a reflection at the level of DP of the insensitivity of presupposition to illocutionary force and in particular to negation. More importantly, we suggest that the existence of rain can even be conveyed as DP accommodation. Suffices for this that the Hearer doesn’t know about the rain but takes the focus of the utterance to be about umbrellas, and eventually learns about the existence of the rain when gathering -- more or less consciously -- the basic reasons for talking about umbrellas. In such a case, even I’m not taking the umbrella may lead to accommodate the existence of the rain, for example if the Hearer understands that the Speaker leaves the umbrella for him to use. 4. Presuppositions bypassing controls of relevance In situations involving persuasion, presupposition and DP accommodation may have deceptive consequences. We suggest that an individual can be led to consent to some information that is inconsistent with his background knowledge Author's personal copy 184 L. de Saussure / Journal of Pragmatics 59 (2013) 178--189 not only without cancelling one of the terms of the inconsistency but even without noticing the issue at all. Unsurprisingly, if these mechanisms are stable procedures and are tied to general cognitive principles, speakers may (consciously or not) exploit them in persuasion. Our argument belongs to a wider picture where, more generally, fallacies are efficient in persuasion because they exploit the gaps left open by the pragmatic principles managing communication in general (‘heuristics’ in Tversky and Kahneman, 1974), as a trade-off for their otherwise high efficiency and usefulness in natural, ordinary situations of communication.13 If, as we suggest, the type of inconsistent presupposition accommodation we address has to do with such gaps, and those gaps are better captured in terms of cognitive biases or cognitive illusions (see Pohl, 2004) allowing for suggestionnability, and furthermore can serve in argumentative structures as grounds for further, necessarily still undue, assumptions, then it is fair to speak of a presupposition bias related to the classical ‘loaded question’ fallacy (or ‘many questions’, see Greco, 2003 who discusses Walton, 1999). In the examples above, there is a clear possibility to react to presupposition accommodation in the conversational exchange: the interlocutor who ignores the presupposed fact, should he feel it necessary, can ask about the cat, the fiancé, guns being permitted elsewhere, the rain, etc. However, rejecting presupposition accommodation is not always that easy and natural, for the reason that doing so involves shifting to a topic which was presented as old information. Information conveyed as given, because it is not relevant in its own right, presenting itself as obviously mutually manifest, will not undergo the type of deeper processing and evaluation that information presented as new is subject to.14 Presuppositions are not the only type of content which can be accommodated at a lower degree of consciousness. Information which get accommodated unconsciously for reasons of relevance is said shallow processed. Shallow processing (Carpenter and Just, 1983; see Allott, 2005 for an account with a concern for deceptive persuasion) is usually described at the lexical-conceptual level. Shallow processing happens when the contents of a conceptual expression in an utterance gets loosened to minimal information in order to fit with a plausible informative intention, so that the presumption of relevance is maintained. A classical example of shallow processing is the ‘survivor’s joke’ where one is asked where should the survivors of a plane crash be buried when the wreckage is located on the exact border of two countries (also discussed in Oswald, 2010). In that case, arguably, the expression ‘survivors’ is broadened into the superordinate category (hyperonym), ‘human beings’, so that the presumption of relevance is maintained at the cost of (unconscious) semantic rectification. The very similar ‘Moses illusion’ (Reder and Kusbit, 1991) where one is asked how many animals of each species Moses (instead of Noah) put into the Arch, functions with the same principles. At the same time, it is worth underlining that the question presupposes that Moses took animals in the Arch. Arguably, a similar type of shallower processing takes place in a number of cases where presupposition accommodation occurs. This fits well with the general properties of presuppositions: they are true independently of the truth of the relevant propositional contents; they escape discursive moves; are unquestioned, being out of the scope of what the Speaker manifests as relevant. Presuppositions are not the topic in focus, in the terms of Beaver et al. (2010). It is known at least since Ducrot (1972) that presuppositions are not truth-evaluable, therefore an answer like it’s false is not expected to apply to presuppositions. This feature appears most strikingly with presuppositions in questions (in (6) below where the presupposition is John went to the examination), which cannot be truth-evaluated. Only the question in focus itself allows for an answer in conversation: (6) A -- Did John fail his examination? B -- * It’s false. He stayed at home. B -- Yes/No Some discursive devices are available in order to challenge presuppositions but they are indirect, such as wait a minute, or they imply a wide scope negation. Negation taking presupposition in its scope -- remember the present King of France -is best understood as a case of negation having scope not onto the proposition but onto the speech act and its accuracy (a metalinguitic negation in Ducrot, 1980, or echoic in Carston, 1998). Questioning a presupposition embeds the expected Q (uestion)--A(nswer) scheme into a higher-level scheme of interaction, but more importantly, it switches the topic of the informal exchange from facts to meta-topics. A face-threatening act can be associated with the discursive move of challenging presuppositions, but such aspects are only consequences of a more pragmatic and down-to-earth effect: questioning a presupposition has the effect of denying, or challenging, the relevance of the utterance. Challenging relevance is in turn a strong move questioning the Speaker’s ability to assess the Hearer’s knowledge, thus it’s a dispreferred move in interaction. 13 This assumption is widely discussed in Sperber et al. (2010); Petty and Cacioppo (1986) and all the tradition referring to central and peripheral systems and linking persuasion to the latter also suggest that peripheral routes are economical and useful but also error-prone devices. See Maillat and Oswald (2009, 2011) for a Relevance theoretic account of manipulative discourse grounded on cognitive heuristics or ‘illusions’. 14 On differences in processing background and foreground information, see Sanford and Sturt (2002) and Amaral et al. (2011). Author's personal copy L. de Saussure / Journal of Pragmatics 59 (2013) 178--189 185 Interestingly, these sociolinguistic aspects have a deeper formal, semantic--pragmatic ground. Ducrot (1972) shows that presuppositions are not expected to connect by means of conjunctions (except with and and if): (7) John stopped smoking (a) because he wants to be healthy (b) *because he liked it (adapted from a French example by Ducrot, 1972:81). Continuation (b) is odd despite the very available conceptual relation, simply because it connects with the presupposition. The interesting thing is that (b) is not only unexpected or somehow strange in conversation: it is impossible as a continuation of (7). We take this as an indication of the rigidity of the confinement of presupposition outside the domain of truth-evaluation in discourse (when presupposition is actually background information and not exploited for foregrounding). It also echoes the fact that presuppositions are ‘‘not subject to (further) discussion’’ (von Fintel, 2008:138) and thus escape discursive connections. We noticed earlier that presuppositions and DPs normally don’t serve as implicit premises for the derivation of further implicatures (at least if implicatures are understood in the sense of having to do with the question in focus). Yet propositions introduced through presupposition accommodation can serve as premises for further arguments, just as any other piece of manifest information can. In the example (8) below, (b) is justified by the presupposition (c) introduced by (a) possibly by means of accommodation (if the Hearer is not aware of John’s previous smoking): (8) (a) John quit smoking. (b) He was coughing every morning. (c) John used to smoke. We shall say that presupposition accommodation prompts for the commitment of the Hearer to its truth without requiring his conscious consent. Thus, we argue that presupposition accommodation bypasses normal controls of relevance. Let us shortly elaborate on this point. Attributing relevance to an utterance is normally the result of a rather simple process, according to Sperber and Wilson (1986, 1995): information is inferred from the utterance so that the information compensates for the processing effort. Thus, there is a control that applies onto both cognitive effects and processing effort so that as soon as the inferred information reaches the optimal balance between those two variables, the Hearer takes it as the intended interpretation. Presuppositions, extended as we did to background reasons for saying or necessary conditions for relevance, thus including DP, form the implicit ground on which a speech act is produced. Hence presuppositions are active in setting the degree of relevance higher than zero, so to say, but they are not grasped as the Speaker’s point. This happens too with undue presuppositions that get accommodated in order to preserve, in the Hearer’s mind, the presumption that the utterance is relevant. We claim that DPs behave as other types of presuppositions in being grasped and possibly accommodated at a lower degree of awareness (i.e. in a shallow way) and with the indication that they are not relevant. Being identified as such (or not being identified as relevant content), they simply escape controls of relevance unless specific conditions are met, and in turn again, they are indeed relevant if sticking to a pure economical definition: they are economically incorporated, since they are not evaluated by relevance-checking procedures. This is not a paradox: DPs are not checked for relevance, they are directly processed and their content is consequently directly incorporated; when accommodation occurs, the content is informative, it produces effect; as it involves little cost, it is relevant. Seuren’s intuition about the economy of presupposition accommodation meets a pragmatic explanation. At the same time, the process of presupposition accommodation occurs in such a way that the information is not epistemically evaluated as non-presupposed content. In some way, presupposition accommodation is relevant without being conscious. Since relevance is conditioned by several requisites, such as consistency, a piece of information that can escape relevance-checking procedures might escape consistency-checking procedures too and, as a consequence, escape critical evaluation. We suggest that this feature is the ground of their persuasive power. When a relevant point deserving a focus of attention is conveyed by the means of presupposition accommodation, the utterance asserts them in a covert way which bypasses epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al., 2010) to some extent. We will name them background assertions. This kind of accommodation can happen with both presuppositions ‘proper’ and DPs. 5. Background assertions: two short case studies Our first case is mentioned by Oswald (2010): French journalist and humorist Philippe Vandel went on the streets in 1999 with a camera and a microphone, telling people that specialists had calculated that New Year’s Day, in 2000, would Author's personal copy 186 L. de Saussure / Journal of Pragmatics 59 (2013) 178--189 be on Friday the 13th, and asking people if they thought that was bad omen. Many people on the show did answer the question, whether they were afraid or not, but did not react to the inconsistency that the 1st day of the year cannot be a 13th15. To some, Vandel says: ‘‘it has ben calculated that New Year’s day 2000 will be a Friday the 13th’’ but to some others he says ‘‘. . .that the 1st of January 2000 will be a Friday the 13th’’, without the full wording of the date affecting the effect.16 Oswald (2010:377--378) suggests that ‘Friday the 13th’ gets shallow processed as ‘‘some date associated with superstition’’ so that the dates are not fully grasped.17 This would nicely explain why elements in the background can be ruled out, such as ‘survivors are alive’ or ‘New Year’s Day is a 1st (of January)’. In their groundbraking work on the role of context in manipulation, Maillat and Oswald (2009, 2011) suggest that various devices can lead the Hearer to a narrowerthan-necessary contextualization (in our terms), which keeps some critical information away from the context of interpretation (assuming that there is a context of interpretation which consists in a selection of available propositions taken as premises in the inference). Shallow processing achieves indeed such a process of keeping away those assumptions that are inconsistent. Yet there is a striking fact which doesn’t fit well with this picture of ‘Friday the 13th’ being treated as ‘some bad fortune day’ without further considerations: the information that New Year’s Day 2000 is on Friday the 13th gets sufficiently incorporated in (possibly temporary) beliefs on the Hearer’s side to allow for further developments and arguments. To people saying they are not superstitious, Vandel asks confirmation that they will celebrate New Year’s Eve as usual, ‘‘that is, on Thursday the 12th’’. Thursday the 12th is not in any way associated with a superstition and hardly gets accommodated the way ‘Friday the 13th’ is. It is grasped as the day before the one referred to as New Year’s Day. The fact that one is going to celebrate on Thursday the 12th is the result of an inference taking ‘Friday the 13th is New Year’s Day’ as premise, not ‘some bad fortune day’. Thus, it is not only that a background knowledge like ‘a New Year’s Day is on January the 1st’ is simply not retrieved because of shallow processing, but also that the competing presupposed assumption brought in by the utterance -- here a modal presupposition, that a New Year’s Day can be on a 13th -- is solid enough to allow for further inferences still inconsistent with deeper background assumptions. In the Friday the 13th case, we suggest, shallow processing is indeed achieved in order to maintain the presumption of relevance, but shallow processing does not always involve merely exchanging meaning for a lighter one: it leads to disregard the literal meaning of the utterance, but it also allows for possibly extracting it. In our case, the journalist first tells a fact: ‘‘it has been calculated that. . .’’ and then raises a question which presupposes it on the basis of a complement ellipsis completed anaphorically (‘‘are you afraid?’’). Thus when processing the question, the assumption that January 1st will be on Friday 13th is already treated as a presupposition. It would not have been the case, probably, with a question like ‘‘is this possible?’’ which directly addresses the fact, not some other aspect that relies on this fact as a contextual assumption. During online processing, critical evaluation is complex because of the time it takes; our assumption is that the information gets actually incorporated in the Hearer’s set of beliefs when the question that presupposes its truth is raised. At this point, we speculate that a presupposition accommodation occurs: the proposition about New Year’s Day being on a Friday the 13th is first suspended, then straight away consented to through accommodation when the question, immediately following the statement, arises. Moreover, such accommodated background assumptions are strong enough to allow for further inferences. The factors influencing this process probably have to do with the fact that the presumption of relevance is made stronger by the situation: the Speaker has all the apparatus of the professional journalist and will hardly be suspected of joking. Yet this is not explicative, since other possible nonsensical presuppositions will be ruled out, for example if what is said or presupposed contradicts direct perceptual evidence. On the other hand, the Friday the 13th effect, according to our own experience, can happen to hearers in ordinary conversation without any further manipulation to strengthen the Hearer’s trust towards the Speaker. In the above case, we wish to insist, the piece of information at issue is presented as outside the focus of the question (which is ‘are you afraid?’), therefore acting like presupposed information at the time when the question is raised. The above case has no direct application in social interactions: it is an uncontrolled, empirical investigation that shows how much presupposed information is strong and efficient in persuasion. Our second case is different in this respect, and involves DPs rather than presuppositions in the strict sense: on November 29th, 2009, the Swiss population was called to vote on a proposition (made by a populist party) to ban the construction of minarets in the country. The result of the vote was a strong majority of yes (above 57%). Many explanations were proposed in the media and also in some scholarly 15 This happened in France; translations are ours. Full video on: http://www.philippevandel.com/2009/01/le-jour-de-l-an.html. This is not a scientific experiment. It is not known if some people reacted to the inconsistency, but the fact that the many people shown in the video did not is enough to address this case. 17 Sperber (personal communication, 2011) suggests a similar analysis. 16 Author's personal copy L. de Saussure / Journal of Pragmatics 59 (2013) 178--189 187 papers, elaborating on the assumption that this decision was either not rational, was grounded on sociocultural dimensions (fear of the other, impulse of rejection of the foreigner, etc.) and had to do with symbolic values.18 Yet no attention was paid to the clash between the presupposition accommodations involved by the question submitted to the vote and background knowledge expectedly available to the addressees.19 In effect, for the question to be relevant, the following has to be true or likely: (a) There is a relevant number of minarets actually in place or projected. (b) Minarets could modify Swiss landscapes. (c) Minarets are a threat of some type. Whereas these might be analyzed as weak implicatures in the relevance-theoretic framework, we insist that (a)--(b) form distinct types of meanings invited by the question, dealing with a priori background assumptions. At the same time, they are not entailed stricto sensu by any semantic representation associated to the question in focus. Hence we think of such contents as DPs. Assumption (a) is needed for reasons of relevance: it is not relevant to ask about the banning of things that do not exist in some relevant quantity (perhaps this is the discursive variant of existential presupposition). Yet most people never ever saw a single minaret in Switzerland: only 4 existed at the time of the vote, all of them small architectural details of mosques in suburban areas. It’s plausible too that many people simply didn’t have any knowledge about existing or non-existing projects for building new minarets, so that the accommodation of such a DP is open. Assumption (b) is needed for reasons of relevance too, since banning minarets only makes sense if minarets could be built in places where there might be reasons to avoid them, but it omits the otherwise known fact that there are laws constraining constructions and preserving landscapes. More interesting is assumption (c). It is necessarily incorporated since there is no reason to think of forbidding something which has no relation to some danger. It is noteworthy that a notion of danger was very present in the campaign, notably in adverts showing minarets shaped as missiles piercing the national flag with the word stop (bearing in turn the presupposition that the displayed image is about a real and ongoing type of eventuality).20 These assumptions, being necessary for the presumption of relevance to be preserved, had thus to be considered true by the people who voted yes -- at least by those who didn’t vote only because of bad feelings against Muslims whatever the meaning of the question and the underlying issues.21 The Federal Government probably didn’t appropriately communicate on the topic, but Government members might well have considered (maybe unconsciously) that presupposed assumptions (a)--(c) would be straight away ruled out as absurd, expecting that the right-wing party would lose its credibility. Yet the contrary happened: the presuppositions, or some adaptation of these through shallow processing, were incorporated. The ‘danger of minarets’ presupposition might have been accommodated in a metonymic form of ‘danger of Islam’ or, rather, of ‘radical Islamism’, in any case a DP hinging on some notion of danger. There is much more to add on the minarets story, and the analysis above is only partial. Our point is however that both cases (Friday the 13th and the minarets) have in common to bring new assumptions in the form of presupposed background information, which rule out (momentarily or not) a priori strong assumptions. Thus, it is expected that if one had asked people whether they thought that New Year’s Day can possibly be on a Friday the 13th, or if there are many minarets in Switzerland, would have led to other results completely. In such cases, the utterance gains relevance mostly not because of the implicatures it leads to but because of the background assumptions it requires as DPs in order to maintain relevance. An utterance like the question about the ban of 18 For example, Green interestingly suggests: ‘‘Minarets [. . .] embody religious presence. They are highly visible religious ‘‘incursions’’ into secular space. Their presence in the landscapes and cityscapes of Europe blurs the boundaries between the religious and the secular that Europeans have laboured to construct in modern history’’ (Green, 2010:621). This element is certainly somewhere in the background knowledge of a number of people although below awareness; the idea that minarets are signs of Islam willing of playing a role in public life was put forward by the initiative’s committee (Green, 2010). Other scholars have suggested that the ban of minarets had to do with a particular norm of immigration acceptability dependent on societal assimilation (Gianni and Clavien, 2012). However what matters to us here is how the question was interpreted and what was the contextual background that had to be incorporated in order to make rational sense of it. 19 A voting question in Switzerland takes the following form ‘‘Do you accept the proposition of law that. . ./the popular initiative P?’’. In the present case, the question was Do you accept the popular initiative (i.e. the proposition to have a new law) ‘‘The construction of minarets is banned?’’; the material available to voters includes always leaflets with the arguments in favour of the proposed law and against it, as well as the official position of the government. What matters to us in this story is not about the linguistic wording but the fact that such a question on banning the minarets, in itself and independently of the linguistic form it takes, involves presupposed assumptions. 20 The advert was forbidden in some cantons who judged it offensive. 21 An educated person, it was reported to me, said, while having a walk in the quaint villages of southern Swiss Alps: ‘I wouldn’t like a minaret around here’. Such events, we think, lead to the conclusion that some voters (the vast majority of them, we think) indeed accommodated the discursive presuppositions we are talking about. That some other voters reacted on a purely emotional basis is still a possibility, but pure emotional reaction does not appear a plausible explanation of the whole voting that took place. Author's personal copy 188 L. de Saussure / Journal of Pragmatics 59 (2013) 178--189 minarets, in case the discursive presuppositions (a) to (c) are not actually held by the audience at speech time, gains relevance by means of incorporating them into their background knowledge (that is, by updating the background with them) in a shallow way. Hence such propositions have ‘background relevance’, because DPs provide relevance to them and because they are treated as background. This is taking place because the Hearer, unless strong evidence to the contrary obtains, maintains, even in spite of incongruous messages, his assumption that the Speaker is satisfying the presumption of relevance (or being cooperative, if we look at this through Gricean lenses). In such cases, propositions presented as given information behave in the Hearer’s cognition as true background even if they are, in fact, new. 6. Conclusion and perspectives Not loosing time and effort on common knowledge, or on already stabilized knowledge, is an expected feature of cognition if cognition is geared to the maximization of relevance or any other principle of economy. Thus the pragmatic properties of the processing of presuppositions that we examined make them a very successful heuristic in usual settings of communication, but, at the same time, they form a critical gap for the evaluation of the information they embed when the inferential task they are involved in concerns non-communicative goals or when they are intentionally provided in order to have a better chance to bypass the addressee’s critical evaluation. We suggested in this article that the power of presuppositions has to do with the status of givenness assigned to information attached to them, regardless of the actual givenness or newness of information. Interestingly, a number of cognitive biases long known in the literature, arguably, have to do with presuppositions. Framing biases (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974) may be interpreted as relying on a frame which is treated as background when processing further questions or utterances. Similarly, so-called ‘labelling effects’ (Loftus and Palmer, 1974) and ‘misinformation effects’ (Loftus et al., 1978) associate with words presupposed encyclopaedic information or trigger existential presuppositions (typically with definite descriptions).22 A comparison between presuppositions and the confirmation bias leads to a stronger hypothesis, to be further explored. If confirming previously held information is less energy consuming than contradicting it, then pre-existing information has a strength directly tied to energy consumption. It may well be in response to this that presuppositions, including DPs, have the strength they have. It makes even more sense if considering presuppositions from the combined angles of (i) their relevance, (ii) their tendency to bypass (energy-consuming) critical evaluation, and (iii) their stability in beliefs. The confirmation of pre-existing information, thus possibly presupposed in an utterance, is easier. Maybe, what we called earlier in this paper the presuppositional bias is tied not only to other types of biases having to do with previously stated information but to an overarching bias of confirmation, itself related to the economy of cognition, with manifestations in discourse, forming the grounds of both efficiency in relevance and the risks associated with paths of least effort. 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Argumentation 13, 379--383. Louis de Saussure, Ph.D., is professor of linguistics at the University of Neuchâtel, where he co-founded the Centre for Cognitive Science. He was lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He was a visiting scholar at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and at University College London. His research in cognitive pragmatics focuses primarily on time and modality but extends to the cognitive and pragmatics underpinnings of persuasion in discourse.