Presupposition and Context

In our days, the notion of semantic presupposition is not very much en vogue. There are followers of Russell, who try to eliminate this concept from semantics altogether, for instance Boer and Lycan (cf. [4]) or Cresswell (cf. [8]). Second, there is another very influential group which includes authors like Atlas, Gazdar, Kempson and Wilson. These authors claim the following: Sentence (1) entails sentence (3), whereas sentence (2) does not. (1) The king of France is bald. (2) The king of France is not bald. (3) There is a king of France. Unlike Russell, they say that (2) is not ambiguous. The negation does not have different scopes such that there is a reading of (2) which entails (3) and another reading which does not. The negation is simply supposed to be general. (2) may be true for different reasons: Either the king of France does not exist at all; then he can’t be bald and therefore (2) is true. Or the king of France exists but he fails to be bald. In the latter case, (2) is true, too. The negation just does not tell us which of the two cases obtains.