The reprimand on p.139 is appropriate because you illegitimately assume that applying the ccp of the sentence uttered to a context and seeing what the result is is the only way that an utterance can change a context. It is the only type of context change directly modeled in the ccp-account, but there is no claim in that account that context doesn’t change in other ways as well.

I don’t see any special role for what you call the “goat stage of interpretation” (at which it has been absorbed that the utterance has occurred).

I do.

Ever since 1998 (again in my 2003 book, and again in my present article, p. 184), my attack on the idea of accommodation has been based on the assumption that one wanted to say, as Stalnaker did, that the presence of a presupposition in the common ground is a condition on the appropriateness of an utterance. You’re giving that up.

The presence of a presupposition in the common ground at the point when the assertion is to be added to the common ground is a condition on the appropriateness of an utterance. The point of my discussion (and Stalnaker’s) is that one needs to be careful when one speaks of the common ground. Since people’s beliefs and assumption change over time in a conversation, the notion of common ground is time-sensitive.

Even the word “accommodation” is misleading now, because that suggests some kind of making of an exception, and you are no longer claiming that in accepting a presupposition into the common ground one is somehow making an exception to some kind of prohibition. Right?

The presupposition needs to be in the common ground before the assertion can be added to the common ground. There are two ways to satisfy that condition: (i) the presupposition was there even before the utterance occurred, (ii) the presupposition is added by the participants in the conversation during the goat stage of interpretation. The second phenomenon is what I will continue to call accommodation, which doesn’t seem misleading to me, since this process will only occur if the hearers acquiesce. (And yes, we still have the issue of explaining what governs the speaker’s choice between presupposing p and asserting p.)

I read what you said in 1.1.1, and I was prepared to hear you answer by appeal to it, but I was confused by it, because if your position is what I have just summarized, then you don’t need the complicated, and, frankly, unpersuasive argument on p. 144 that you borrow from an extremely unclear passage in Stalnaker, who was still trying to define presupposition in terms of common ground. And the reprimand at the bottom of p. 139 is the wrong thing to say. In the passage you attack, I was criticizing Heim. Your position is that we need to distinguish between the admissibility of an asserted proposition and the appropriateness of an utterance, but Heim does not have that distinction in mind, because she does not have your three-valued semantics (or did not at the time, I don’t know what she thinks now). And I don’t see any special role for what you call the “goat stage of interpretation” (at which it has been absorbed that the utterance has occurred).

Ever since 1998 (again in my 2003 book, and again in my present article, p. 184), my attack on the idea of accommodation has been based on the assumption that one wanted to say, as Stalnaker did, that the presence of a presupposition in the common ground is a condition on the appropriateness of an utterance. You’re giving that up. Even the word “accommodation” is misleading now, because that suggests some kind of making of an exception, and you are no longer claiming that in accepting a presupposition into the common ground one is somehow making an exception to some kind of prohibition. Right?

The “will” here made me think that cg-2 did not already exist at the time of the inference.

Yes, the point of it all is that common grounds are simply made up of the attitudes of the participants in a conversation and since those attitudes change over time, common grounds change over time, both by people making inferences while the conversation is going on and via the essential effect of assertion. So, cg-2 is the common ground to which the assertion of (5) is to be added, but it is not the common ground as it was before the utterance. cg-2 is the common ground as it is after the goat stage of interpretation, after the hearers have processed the fact that the utterance of (5) has happened but before they have accepted the assertion of (5).

I don’t know what the utility is of talking about the common ground as it will be at a certain point in time not existing yet at a certain earlier time. That’s as if you said that my belief that it is now 5:56am didn’t already exist two minutes ago. That is accurate, but I don’t find it useful. But whatever floats your boat …

The other answer is that at time t, the hearer infers that at time t Phoebe believes that at some later time, call it t+e, the common ground will contain the proposition that Phoebe has a cat. (I don’t know whether cg-2 is already supposed to exist at time t+e or whether that comes into existence at a still later time.) My objection to this we need to be able to see why Phoebe would expect that and I don’t know how to explain it without invoking the very notion of accommodation that we are supposed to be explaining.

I’m glad we’re talking about the account in the paper now. This is indeed what I present there.

Why would Phoebe expect cg-2 to contain the proposition that she has a cat? Because she recognizes (and expects the hearers to recognize) that otherwise the sentence couldn’t be used to update cg-2 by adding the proposition that she had to take the cat to the vet. And why could the sentence otherwise not be used to effect that update? In Section 1.1.1, I set out my view of that (which is different from Stalnaker’s more agnostic or more hopeful view): presuppositions are simply part of the semantic specification of sentences. A (stipulated) bridging principle derives that semantic presuppositions turn into requirements imposed on common grounds that need to be satisfied before the essential effect of an assertion can be achieved.

In your last reply, you write, “Once we make sure that you and I are actually talking about the same proposal, we can turn to what in this account distinguishes accommodating a presupposition and accepting an assertion.” This isn’t quite what you mean, is it? What we have been talking about all along (for 10 years) is what distinguishes accommodating from accepting. What you talk about in the coda is why a speaker would ask a hearer to accommodate rather than accept.

Yes. The distinction between accommodating a presupposition and accepting an assertion in this view looks fairly minimal (to a first approximation it concerns whether a proposition that the speaker wants in the common ground is added to it in the goat stage of interpretation or in the stage where asserted propositions are added), so the question is why are the rules for what should be presented as an assertion and what can be smuggled in as presupposed material so stringent.

So now I’ll try to stick the terminology as you have just defined it. I am assuming that you think that cg-2 does contain the proposition that Phoebe has a cat. cg-3 contains the additional proposition that she has to get her cat from the veterinarian. In addition, we need to mention a time when the utterance has taken place but the proposition that Phoebe has a cat has not yet become common ground (because they have not finished thinking things through). The common ground at that time is not cg-1 and it’s not cg-2. Maybe we need cg-1.5. But I’ll just speak of time t.

So my question is: How do we get from cg-1 (or cg-1.5) to cg-2? The answers that I have entertained and rejected are these two:

1) One answer would be that at time t, the hearer infers that Phoebe believes that at that time it is common ground that she has a cat. (And then somehow, from there, it comes to be the case that it is common ground that she has a cat — we have not talked about that step at all.) My objection to this is that it requires the hearer to infer that Phoebe has a false belief, since at the time the inference is made, it is in fact not common ground that she has a cat.

2) The other answer is that at time t, the hearer infers that at time t Phoebe believes that at some later time, call it t+e, the common ground will contain the proposition that Phoebe has a cat. (I don’t know whether cg-2 is already supposed to exist at time t+e or whether that comes into existence at a still later time.) My objection to this we need to be able to see why Phoebe would expect that and I don’t know how to explain it without invoking the very notion of accommodation that we are supposed to be explaining.

In your last reply, you write, “Once we make sure that you and I are actually talking about the same proposal, we can turn to what in this account distinguishes accommodating a presupposition and accepting an assertion.” This isn’t quite what you mean, is it? What we have been talking about all along (for 10 years) is what distinguishes accommodating from accepting. What you talk about in the coda is why a speaker would ask a hearer to accommodate rather than accept.

One more time, it is crucial to pay attention: the relevant common ground is “the common ground to which (5) is to be added”. This need not be the common ground as it was before the utterance of (5). The common ground is changed by the mere utterance of (5) and attending inferences by attentive hearers, even before the truth-conditional content of (5) is added to the common ground.

So, when you say parenthetically in your latest comment that “the common ground to which (5) is to be added” would be cg-1, you reveal that you didn’t pay attention.

cg-1 (the common ground before the utterance) =/= cg-2 (the common ground as it is changed by the fact of the utterance and attending inference) =/= cg-3 (the common ground resulting from accepting the assertion of the sentence uttered).

There is more on this in footnote 16 on page 167. The view goes back all the way to Stalnaker’s “Assertion” paper.

Once we make sure that you and I are actually talking about the same proposal, we can turn to what in this account distinguishes accommodating a presupposition and accepting an assertion. As I say in the coda to the paper, there is a real issue here. The account I endorse distinguishes distinct steps in the interpretation process for these two kind of updates to the common ground. And there do seem to be conversational rules about what kind of content can be smuggled in aiming at presupposition accommodation and what kind of content should properly be asserted rather than presupposed. But it remains unclear what, if any, explanatory force the account has: why are the conversational rules what they are, why should only “uncontroversial” material be presupposed while anything that might reasonably trigger debate should be straightforwardly asserted?

Stalnaker has some suggestion about this, but for now I remain puzzled. So, that is an interesting topic for further discussion, but I wish that we could get over misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the basic exposition of the timing view.

Is that just a blind assumption we make, or could we have a good reason to think that Phoebe believes that it will belong to cg-2 that she has a cat? I would think it should at least be possible for us to have a good reason. A reason for us would be that we can see that she has a reason to think that after she speaks we will believe that she has a cat. But what reason of that kind could she have? It can’t be that she has asserted that she has a cat and we will accept that assertion. She has not asserted it; she has presupposed it. Perhaps, then, it is because has presupposed that she has a cat and we will accommodate that presupposition. But what is the difference between accommodating a presupposition and accepting an assertion? The answer was supposed to be that accommodation is the special kind of process that we are here describing. But it turns out that we don’t know what that is apart from some prior understanding of accommodation; so we do not in fact have that prior understanding.

It will not do simply to say that in accommodation the hearer adjusts the common ground to include the presupposition, because that does not distinguish accommodating a presupposition from accepting an assertion.

Complexity is not the problem. And what I said was “plainly wrong” was not the theory of accommodation but that the hearer has to believe falsely that he speaker believes the presupposition to be common ground.

I know that you were paraphrasing Stalnaker. I said so in note 11 of my own paper in that volume, and observed that he also does not address the pertinent sort of case, in which both speaker and hearer know that the presupposition is not common ground.

Imagine my magic screwdriver: screws adjust to it, rather than me having to choose the right screwdriver for the right screw. I approach the screw with the screwdriver, knowing full well that the screw doesn’t at the moment have the right head for the screwdriver to fit, but I trust that as usual the magic will happen, and lo and behold, just as the screwdriver touches the head of the screw, that head has adjusted its shape to the screwdriver. If I could make such a screwdriver, I could make a fortune …

The claim is that presupposition accommodation has some of that magic, that the magic is fueled by the fact that people can adjust their assumptions in the face of new facts (goats walking into the room, an utterance being made, …), and that during that “goat stage” of interpretation, the common ground can be adjusted to the requirements of an utterance.