Meaning Meeting - Paolo Santorio / Asymmetry and anaphora
Meaning Meeting - Paolo Santorio / Asymmetry and anaphora
Monday March 24, the Meaning Meeting returns from Spring Break with a discussion by Paolo Santorio, abstracted below, aimed at a theory of Local Contexts that works as well for epistemic modality as it does for anaphora.
Asymmetry and Anaphora
The notion of a local context has been deployed in a fruitful way both in theories of presupposition and, more recently, in theories of epistemic modality. But, at the moment, we don't have a unified theory that handles both phenomena. The key problem case is conjunction. Conjunctions appear to generate asymmetric local contexts for the case of presupposition, as shown by the data in (1), but symmetric local contexts for the case of epistemic modals, as shown by the data in (2).
(1) a. It is raining, and Alice knows that it's raining.
b. # Alice knows that it's raining, and it's raining.
(2) a. # It's raining and it might not be raining.
b. # It might not be raining and it's raining.
I pursue a unified view. The idea is that the basic mechanism is asymmetric through and through, but that the asymmetry is masked in the case of epistemic modals. I sketch an account that exploits a kind of modal anaphora, and in particular two ideas: (i) every sentence is a predicate of a modal pronoun, denoting a set of worlds (essentially, the local context); (ii) this modal pronoun can be treated as a Heimian indefinite, or a Heimian definite. Among other things, this creates an interesting bridge with theories of presupposition in a different tradition, i.e. theories based on DRT.