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Presupposing counterfactuality

Paper · 2020 · Julia Zakkou

Summary

The paper challenges a consensus in philosophy and linguistics: that "counterfactual" conditionals only conversationally implicate that their antecedent is false, rather than presupposing it. Zakkou limits the question to past subjunctive conditionals (PSCs, "would have" conditionals) and leaves non-past ones (NPSCs) aside. She suspects NPSCs do merely implicate falsity. She does not build a new formal theory. Instead she re-examines the standard objections to the presupposition view one by one. These are Anderson's autopsy case, Stalnaker's claim that modus tollens would become question-begging, Edgington's detective-investigation case, and von Fintel's necessarily-true-antecedent case. Her method relies on one bridging assumption, (Ass): if PSCs presuppose antecedent falsity, then every speaker who uses one felicitously presupposes it. She then tests whether each objection's linguistic data actually conflict with this. None does. The objections either mix up two senses of "presupposing" or treat presupposing as if it required believing. So the implicature view cannot simply be assumed. This matters for whether counterfactuality belongs to conventional meaning, and for whether indicative and subjunctive conditionals differ deeply.

Key points

  • The paper targets PSCs, for example a conditional claiming that Jones, supposing he had used cocaine, would have spent the whole night dancing. NPSCs are explicitly left for future work.
  • Anderson's argument uses a doctor at an autopsy. She says Jones would have shown the same symptoms had he taken arsenic, and this is heard as support for arsenic. The contrast "So he did not take arsenic" (odd) versus "So he took arsenic" (fine) is the core data. Analogies with definite descriptions (the "man with the martini") are discussed as supposed parallels.
  • Against Stalnaker, Zakkou separates two senses of presupposing a conclusion:
    • the technical sense, in which the speaker only anticipates where the argument is going;
    • the ordinary sense, in which the conclusion is slipped in as a tacit premise. Only the second makes an argument question-begging, and the presupposition view commits only to the first.
  • Against Edgington, she notes that presupposing a proposition requires neither knowing it nor believing it. A detective can therefore still check whether Jones is dancing.
  • Against von Fintel (the Polly/Uli dinner example), she appeals to modal subordination (Roberts 1989). Supporting evidence: PSCs with necessarily true antecedents are odd when they open a conversation, but fine after another PSC.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Two utterances that differ only in the inferred conclusion ("so not-p" vs "so p") can show which content a construction actually carries, which makes a cheap diagnostic.
  • I2. Separating presupposition from belief or knowledge lets a speaker background a proposition while still being open to checking it. This blocks hasty inferences about what someone "knows."
  • I3. A later conditional can be read inside the hypothetical scenario set up by an earlier one (modal subordination), so its antecedent is evaluated against that scenario rather than reality.
  • I4. Discourse position works as evidence: a construction that is fine mid-discourse but odd as an opening line signals dependence on prior context.
  • I5. A content can be marked as where the argument is heading without being a premise, which keeps argument structure non-circular.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Build paired negative-control tests in which a counterfactual is followed by an affirming or a denying conclusion, and check that the system's coherence judgments flip correctly.
  • I2 (frames): In prag, store counterfactual antecedent falsity as a speaker presupposition with its own status, not as an asserted fact or a belief of the speaker.
  • I3 (world): Let the world builder open a hypothetical sub-world for each "had…would have" clause, and attach following conditionals to it rather than to the actual world.
  • I4 (answer): When a QA item contains a conditional with no hypothetical context set up earlier, flag it for a modal-subordination reading before answering.
  • I5 (frames): Tag anticipated conclusions separately from premises when extracting argument frames, so circularity checks do not misfire.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Freie Universität BerlinBerlin · Germany13 works · 7,043 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 worksArts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPhilosophy · 287 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Coreference resolution · 575 works

Cite

Cite as Julia Zakkou. 2020. Presupposing counterfactuality. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.12.21

@article{zakkou2020presupposing,
  title = {{Presupposing counterfactuality}},
  author = {Julia Zakkou},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.12.21},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.12.21}
}

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