As brief as possible (but no briefer)

For years researchers struggle to explain an impossible muddle of data, and then BAM! some genius comes and publishes an article in Theoretical Linguistics that turns everything on its head. In this case, the bugbear is the projection problem for presuppositions. The mind-blowing solution succeeds in explaining presuppositional inferences and felicity judgments without the abstruse non-classical logics or transformations of logical forms that others tried previously, but instead with standard classical logic. Most importantly, for this is what makes the innovative everything-on-its-head proposal special, it solves the problem not in terms of projection, but in terms of local satisfaction. The paper to which I refer is, of course, Lauri Karttunen’s (1974) Presupposition and Linguistic Context, published in the very first volume of this journal. Philippe Schlenker’s (henceforth: PS) Be Articulate: A Pragmatic Theory of Presupposition is an important but flawed postscript to Karttunen’s paper. The current work is a postscript to PS’s postscript. After a little warmup exercise to help get into a suitably critical frame of mind, I will put PS’s contribution in context, and then point to some failings and peculiarities.