Presupposition – Maverick Philosopher

Is Mariology a Part of the Presuppositionalist ‘Package Deal’? A Question for Flood

Full disclosure: I am not a theologian. I am a philosopher of religion who, as part of his task, thinks about theologoumena which, on a broad interpretation of the term, are simply things said about God, a term which therefore includes not only official, dogmatic pronunciamenti of, say, the RCC's magisterium, but also includes conjectures, speculations, and opinions about God that are not officially promulgated.

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Anthony Flood writes,

The Christian worldview, expressed on the pages of the Bible, is a revelatory “package deal,” if you will, not a buffet of optional metaphysical theses. The organic connectedness (within the divine decree) of creation, trinity, and incarnation—even the so-called “contingencies of history,” e.g., Joshua’s impaling the King of Ai on a pole after slaughtering all of his subjects (Joshua 8)—await clarification in God’s good time, if He sees fit to provide it, but are put before us for our assent today.

Flood is a presuppositionalist who believes that "intelligible predication" presupposes the truth of the Christian worldview. Thus, "The Christian does not avail himself of his birthright (Christian theistic) worldview because it confers omniscience on him, but rather because (a) it saves intelligible predication and (b) no competing worldview does."

We are being told that the Christian worldview, as Flood understands it, offers the best and indeed the only explanation of the fact of intelligible predication. That intelligible predication is indeed a fact I do not question. But I do have some questions about Flood's explanation of the fact. One of them concerns what he includes in his explanation. It is clear that he includes more than the existence of God where 'God' refers to a purely spiritual being, of a personal nature, endowed with the standard omni-attributes, who exists of metaphysical necessity, and who created out of nothing everything distinct from himself, or at least everything concrete distinct from himself. One reason for this 'more' is because Flood's God is not just personal, but tri-personal: one God in three divine persons. This is not intended as tri-theism, of course, but as monotheism: one God in three divine persons.

Furthermore, in the Christian worldview as Flood understands it, the second person of the Trinity, variously known as the Logos, the Word, God the Son, became man in a particular man, Jesus of Nazareth, at a particular time in a particular place. One and the same person, the Son, without ceasing to be fully divine, became fully human, with a human body and a human soul, by being born of a virgin named 'Mary' in a stable in Bethlehem. So it seems that the 'package deal' must include, in addition to Trinity and Incarnation, some version of Mariology. Why must it? Because Jesus Christ, the God-Man, had to have gotten his human nature from somewhere. He inherited his human nature from his human mother.

Let's think about this. God the Son is not a creature. Is Jesus a creature? His earthly mother is a creature. Jesus had no heavenly mother, at least not until the Assumption of Mary, body and soul, into heaven. But that was long after the Incarnation event; I won't say anything more about the Assumption here. And Jesus had no earthly father. Joseph was his step-father, and a step-father is not a father in the earthly or biological sense of the term. The father of Jesus is a purely spiritual being. So Jesus Christ, the God-Man, at the moment of Incarnation, has a heavenly father but no earthly father, and an earthly mother but no heavenly mother.

Mary became pregnant. What was the nature of the inseminating seed? It had to be purely spiritual. Why? Because it came from God who is purely spiritual. What about the inseminated egg? It had to be physical. Why? Because it was the ovum of an earthly woman. It was a miraculous pregnancy by supernatural agency.

Now the God-Man had to be free of original sin to be able to do his redemptive work and restore right relations between man and God. So he could not have 'contracted' original sin from his earthly mother. Hence the logic of the soteriological narrative required that Mary be conceived without original sin. Hence the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

It therefore seems that Mariology must be part of Flood's 'package deal,' and indeed a Mariology that includes Immaculate Conception. So my first question to Flood is this:

Do you hold that the only possible explanation of intelligible predication must be in terms of a Christian worldview that includes not only Trinity and Incarnation but also Immaculate Conception?

This is not a rhetorical question. It is a genuine question raised so that I might understand what exactly Flood's position is. Tony is making a mistake if he thinks I am being polemical here. I am not. I honestly find presuppositionalism puzzling and I am trying to understand it.

My second question to Flood which I cannot develop and defend in this installment is this:

Given the well-known logical conundra that arise when we try to render intelligible to ourselves such doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation, conundra that seem to threaten the intelligibility of these doctrines, and therefore seem to threaten the intelligibility of any explanation of intelligible predication in terms of a worldview committed to them, how do you respond? Do you maintain that the supposed logical puzzles are easily solved and that Trinity and Incarnation in their orthodox formulations are logically and epistemically unobjectionable? If that is not the tack you take, what tack do you take?

Two Senses of ‘Presupposition’ in Van Til and in General

Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., p. 279: "Thus the truth of Christianity appears to be the immediately indispensable presupposition of the fruitful study of nature." My gloss:

The fruitful study of nature presupposes the truth of Christianity. It is a fact that we study nature, and it is a fact that our natural-scientific procedures are successful in many ways and in many areas of inquiry. Now what is factual is actual, and what is actual is possible. But how is it possible? What are the conditions of the possibility of our successful understanding of nature and (some of) her laws? We are being told by Van Til that an indispensable and thus necessary condition is the truth of Christianity.

This illustrates one legitimate use of 'presupposition.' Presupposition in this sense relates an activity or procedure to a proposition. To say that activity A presupposes proposition p is to say that A could not be undertaken with the hope of success were p not true.

For example, the procedures of natural science presuppose the intelligibility of nature. We would not seek the laws of planetary motion, for example, if we did not antecedently believe that the motion of the planets was regular and law-like and understandable by us. But IS nature intrinsically intelligible, intelligible an sich? We have good reason to think so given the success of our physics as shown by its technological implementation.

The presupposition of the intelligibility of nature is therefore well-grounded .

We can push our transcendental regress a step further by asking: what does the intelligibility of nature itself presuppose? What are the conditions of the possibility of nature's being understandable by us? What would have to be the case for nature to be intelligible to us? Here are some candidate answers:

A. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the truth of Christianity. (Van Til)

B. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the existence of God. (It is only because a supreme Intelligence created the world that it is intelligible.)

C. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the truth of Kant's transcendental idealism according to which "The understanding is the law-giver of nature."

D. The intelligibility of nature presupposes an immanent order and teleology along the lines of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. On Nagel's view, the rational order is self-explanatory, a necessary feature of anything that could count as a cosmos. Nagel views the intelligibility of the world as "itself part of the deepest explanation why things are as they are." (17). Now part of the way things are is that they are understandable by us. Given that the way things are is intelligible, it follows that the intelligibility of the world is self-explanatory or self-grounding. "The intelligibility of the world is no accident." (17) "nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings." (17) See my Nagel category for much more on Nagel's book and other works of his.

I myself incline toward (B). (A) entails (B), but I see no reason to accept (A). The sort of bottom-up reasoning that can plausibly justify us in positing God cannot plausibly justify us in positing the God of orthodox Christian theism with all the Reformed add-ons.

The other sense of 'presuppose' is in play here: "I therefore presuppose the Reformed system of doctrine." (Van Til, p. 27) A presupposition in this sense is an assumption that is accepted unconditionally, uncritically, without question.

Bottom-Up and Top-Down

The first sense of presupposition fits with a bottom-up approach. We start with various features of the world we experience and we then ask what makes them possible. We attempt a regress from the given to the hidden. We start with the world, not with God, and we aim to arrive at God. But if we arrive at God in this way, then the properties we will be justified in attributing to God will only be those needed for our explanatory purposes. Those properties are in a certain sense tied to our starting points. For example, one might reason along these lines: the universe is contingent, but its existence is not a brute fact; so it must have a cause external to it. In this way we get to God as First Cause. Or we start from the intelligibility of nature and arrive at God as the supremely intelligent source of the intelligibility we find here below. Supposing we can get to the true God in this way, a God that needn't have caused anything, or sourced the intelligibility of anything distinct from himself, it nonetheless remains the case that the properties of this God will reflect the facts we start with and our need to explain them.

The second sense of presupposition fits with a top-down approach. We start with God, or at least we try to start with God, and then, instead of regressing from the given to the hidden conditions of the possibility of the given, we progress from the hidden to the given. This is possible if the God who is hidden to the natural man with his natural intellect has revealed himself. I understand Van Til to be saying that we know the true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob only because he has revealed himself to us. The revelation that Van Till accepts is the final truth, not only about God, but also about man, and the universe. Since it the revelation of God, it cannot be questioned. We can say that for Van Til, God and his revelation understood along Reformed lines constitute the Absolute Presupposition.

Interim Conclusion

Van Til's bottom-up transcendental argumentation appears to be a sham. Despite appearances, he is not trying to justify belief in the God of orthodox Christian theism by argumentation from given facts (the existence of nature, its order, beauty, and intelligibility) to that which must be presupposed if they are to be so much as possible; he is not trying to justify belief in the Christian God at all. For he just assumes the existence of the Christian God as something that needs no justification and cannot be questioned since it is that without which there would be no questioning or proving or anything else.

With that absolute presupposition in place as his unquestionable starting point, he can then advance, but not justify, claims like (A) above:

A. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the truth of Christianity.

What Van Til is doing in effect is simply presupposing the truth of (A)! What he ought to be doing, however, is giving us a reason to accept (A). It comes as no surprise, then, that Van Til claims that all reasoning is circular reasoning. (123) We will have to examine that claim and Oliphint's defense of it in a separate post.

Van Til just assumes the truth of his worldview and then in effect says: See! I can explain everything, including why there is no neutral ground for the assessment of worldviews, and why people who reject the particulars of my worldview reject them. But this is of no help to someone who sees no reason to accept his worldview in the first place.

Suppose I grant that that sin has noetic consequences. I grant the thesis. But that leaves open the question as what exactly the noetic consequences are. Is it a noetic consequence of sin that I do not accept Van Til's worldview? Or is rather a noetic consequence of sin that Van Til denies that there is a neutral ground for the assessment of worldviews?

Fascinating! More later. And thanks again to Dave Bagwill for inspiring me to get going on this.

Van Til on an Absolutely Certain Proof of Christianity

Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., p. 381:

The best, the only, the absolutely certain proof of the truth of Christianity is that unless its truth be presupposed,there is no proof of anything.

Van Til's claim, to employ some Kantian jargon, is that the truth of Christianity is a condition of the possibility of proving anything. That's quite a claim. Let's put it to the test.

One can prove that the null set is unique by reductio ad absurdum. We begin the reductio by assuming that the null set is not unique, that there are two or more null sets. By the Axiom of Extensionality, two sets differ numerically only if one has a member the other doesn't have, or vice versa. But the null set, by definition, has no members. So the assumption leads to a contradiction. Therefore there cannot be two or more null sets. Hence the null set is unique.

The proof presupposes the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), and I am willing to grant that LNC and the other laws of logic can be argued to presuppose in their turn the existence of an omniscient necessary being. One argument to this conclusion is the Anderson-Welty argument which I critically examine here. I conclude that, while the argument is not rationally compelling, it does contribute to the rationality of belief in God. In other words, the Anderson-Welty argument is a good reason to believe in the existence of God. It does not, however, establish the existence of God in a definitive manner. It does not show that the existence of God is absolutely certain.

At the very most, then, one can plausibly argue to, but not prove, the existence of an omniscient necessary being whose existence is a presupposition of our rational operations in accordance with the laws of logic. But this is a far cry from what Van Til asserts above, namely, that the truth of Christianity with all its very specific claims is a condition of the possibility of proving anything. Trinity and Incarnation are among these specific claims. How are these doctrines supposed to bear upon the laws of logic? Perhaps the Van Tilians have an answer to this. If they do, I would like to know what it is. But not only is Van Til's conception of God Christian, it is also Calvinist so that all the characteristic claims of Calvinism are also packed into the conception of a God that is supposed to be a condition of the possibility of all proof. How does predestination, for example, bear upon the laws of logic?

God, the Cosmos, Other Minds: In the Same Epistemological Boat?

Tony Flood has gone though many changes in his long search for truth. He seems to have finally settled down in Van Til's presuppositionalism. Tony writes,

God, the cosmos, and a plurality of minds other than one’s own are in the same epistemological boat. [. . .] To be skeptical about one but not the other two is arbitrary. Our innate predisposition to be realistic about all three is divinely written “software” that informs our cerebral “wetware.”

I wish I could accept this, but I don't, and I believe I have good reasons for my non-acceptance.

By "in the same epistemological boat," Flood means that God, the physical universe, and other minds are all on a par in respect of dubitability. No one of them is more open to reasonable doubt than the other two, and none of them is open to reasonable doubt. Therefore, one can no more reasonably doubt the existence of God than one can doubt the existence of other minds. Atheism is on a par with solipsism in point of plausibility.

And bear in mind that by 'God' here is meant something very specific, the triune God of Christian theism, the God of the Bible as understood by Van Til and Co. It is one thing to argue — and it can be done with some plausibility — that the validity of all reasoning about any subject presupposes the existence of an omniscient necessary being. It is quite another to argue that the presuppositum must be the God of Christian theism as the latter is expounded by a Calvinist!

Now I concede that doubts about the external world and the the reality of other minds are hyperbolic, and if taken as genuine doubts, as opposed to thought experiments deployed in an epistemology seminar, unreasonable. No one really doubts the existence of rocks or other minds. Not even Bishop Berkeley doubts, let alone denies, the existence of rocks, the tree in the quad, and suchlike. This is why it is perfectly lame to think that Berkeley's idealism can be refuted by kicking a stone. (See Of Berkeley's Stones and the Eliminativist's Beliefs and Argumentum ad Lapidem?)

The hyperbolic skepticism of Descartes' dream argument and its latter-day brain-in-the-vat incarnations are methodological tools of the epistemologist who seeks to understand how we know what we know, and what it is to know what we know. A philosopher who wonders how knowledge is possible may, but need not, and typically does not, deny or have any real doubt THAT knowledge is possible. For example, I may be firmly convinced of the existence of so-called abstract objects (numbers, sets, propositions, uninstantiated properties, etc.) but be puzzled about how knowledge of such entities is possible given that there is no causal interaction with them. That puzzlement does not get the length of doubt or denial. The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for knowledge of the past, knowledge of other minds, and knowledge of the external world.

My point, then, is that (i) practically no one has real doubts about the existence of the external world or the existence of other minds, and that (ii) it would not be reasonable to have such doubts. But (iii) people do have real doubts about the existence of the God of Christian theism, and (iv) it is not unreasonable to have such doubts. The various arguments from evil, and not just these, cast reasonable doubt on Christian theism.

One type of real doubt is an 'existential' doubt, one that grips a person who succumbs to it, and induces fear and perhaps horror. There are those who lose their faith in God and suffer in consequence. They experience a terrible sense of loss, or perhaps they fear that they have been duped by crafty priests who exploited their youthful innocence and gullibility to infect them with superstitious nonsense in order to keep the priestly hustle going. One can lose one's faith in God, and many do. No one loses his faith in the external world or in other minds. And this for the simple reason that there was no need for faith in the first place.

I believe I have said enough to cast serious doubt on, if not refute, the idea that God, the the cosmos, and other minds are are in the same epistemological boat. That's a boat that won't float.

A Transcendental Argument from Assertion to Truth

We start with a fact: we make assertions. The fact is actual, so it must be possible. What are the conditions of its possibility? What has to be the case for assertion to be possible? I will argue that there has to be truth for assertion to be possible.

We proceed by unpacking the concept of assertion.

By 'assertion' I mean the speech act of asserting a proposition, not the proposition asserted taken in abstraction from the act of assertion. Clearly, the asserting and the proposition asserted — the content of the assertion — must be distinguished despite the fact that there is no act of assertion without a content. To assert is to assert something.

If one asserts that p, then one asserts it to be true that p. There is a conceptual link between assertion and truth. Whatever is asserted is presented as true by the one who makes the assertion. And it doesn't matter whether the proposition asserted is true or false. Suppose that, unbeknownst to me, the proposition I assert is false; it is still the case that I assert it to be true.

Assertion is the overt verbal expression of belief, and believing a proposition to be true is logically consistent with the proposition's being false. To believe a proposition is to believe it to be true, and to assert a proposition is to assert it to be true.

To further unpack the concept of assertion, we note that whatever is asserted is asserted to be true independently of one's asserting it. Of course, it does not follow from one's asserting that p that p is true independently of one's asserting it. That's a further question. The point is rather that the act of assertion purports to get at reality as it is in itself. This is a matter of conceptual necessity: the act of assertion would not be what it is if it did have a built-in nisus or directedness toward truth.

We take a step further by noting that to assert a proposition is to affirm it as true independently of anyone's asserting of it. This follows because a proposition such as The Moon is a natural satellite of Earth can be asserted by anyone. If so, then to assert a proposition is to assert it as intersubjectively true, true for all assertors. But if a proposition is asserted to be true independently of anyone's asserting it, then it is asserted to be true not just intersubjectively, but absolutely (non-relatively). But there is no need to speak, pleonastically, of absolute truth; it suffices to speak of truth. Truth is absolute by its very nature.

The main point here is that when one makes an assertion one purports to state what is true in itself independently of any of us. The presupposition of truth is built into the concept of assertion. Now could this presupposition fail in every case of assertion? Granted, it fails in some cases. There are false assertions. Could every assertion be false? Well, if every assertion is false, then it is true that every assertion is false, and if I assert that this is so, then I make a true assertion, one that is true independently of my assertion. Therefore, it cannot be that every assertion is false. So some assertions are true, absolutely true.

Therefore, for assertion to be possible, there must be some (absolute) truths even if we do not know which propositions are the true ones.

In sum: assertion is actual, hence possible. But it cannot be possible unless there are truths that are true independently of anyone's assertions. This is because, as a matter of conceptual necessity, assertion is linked to truth. Therefore, given that assertions are made as a matter of fact, there are truths.

I have just argued from the fact that we make assertions to the existence of truth (truths) as a transcendental presupposition of assertion.

But the following question disturbs me: Is truth merely a transcendental presupposition, or is it also an absolute presupposition?

A Merely Transcendental Presupposition?

Have I really proven the existence of truths that subsist independently of our acts of assertion (and independently of all our other discursive operations), truths that would subsist even if if we did not exist; or have I merely proven that we cannot make assertions without presupposing truth?

I have argued that the fact of assertion presupposes the existence of truths: if there are true assertions, then there is truth. But also: if there are false assertions, then there is truth. But it doesn't follow that necessarily there are truths. For the fact of assertion entails the existence of assertors who are the agents of the various acts of assertion. But these agents are contingent beings. We who assert might not have existed. It follows that the fact of assertion, the starting point of my transcendental argument, is a contingent fact.

What this seems to entail is that the necessity that there be truths is a conditional, as opposed to an absolute, necessity. I would like to be able to conclude that it is is absolutely necessary that there be truth. But the contingency of my starting point seems to spread to my conclusion, relativizing it.

Presupposition and Excluded Middle

If Socrates dies at time t, then Socrates was alive prior to t. If Socrates does not die at t, then Socrates was alive prior to t. Since both 'Socrates dies at t' and 'Socrates does not die at t' entail 'Socrates was alive prior t,' we say that the latter is a semantic presupposition of 'Socrates dies at t.'

But wait a minute! Doesn't what I have written generate an inconsistent tetrad?

1) p entails q

2) Not-p entails q

3) Necessarily, for any p, either p or not-p (Law of Excluded Middle)

4) q is contingent.

The conjunction of the first three limbs entails the negation of the fourth. So something has to give.

It is a datum that q — 'Socrates was alive prior to t' — is contingent: true in some but not all possible worlds. So we either reject semantic presupposition (which requires the truth of both (1) and (2) ) or we reject Excluded Middle.

Why not reject Excluded Middle? Socrates dies at t and Socrates does not die at t are contradictories: each is the negation of the other. There is no possible world in which both are true. And yet there are possible worlds in which neither is true. Those are the worlds in which Socrates does not exist.

Implication and Presupposition

Dave Bagwill asks:

To be more clear: Do all propositions imply an ontology? Is 'imply' strong enough to bear the weight of 'assertion'? Or is 'imply' basically an equivalent of 'presuppose'?

Still not clear enough. Dave. Not even the third question is clear since you didn't specify the sense of 'imply.' But the third question is clear enough to warrant a brief answer, which is: No. Consider the following which is an intuitively clear example of a proposition resting on a presupposition:

Tom regrets lying to his wife.

Necessarily, if Tom regrets lying to his wife, then Tom has lied to his wife. The antecedent implies (in the sense of 'entails') the consequent. (I have defined 'entails' on many occasions.) But note that it is also true that, necessarily, if Tom does not regret lying to his wife, then Tom has lied to his wife.

This yields a criterion of one type of presupposition. A proposition p presupposes a proposition q just in case both p and its negation ~p entail q. One could also say that an entailment of a proposition p is a presupposition of p if and only if p's presupposition survives the negation of p. (If the preceding sentence does not make sense to you, forget it, and focus on the one preceding it.) Consider now:

Tom is drunk.

Necessarily, if Tom is drunk, then someone is drunk. But it is not the case that, necessarily, if Tom is not drunk, then someone is drunk.

So by the criterion lately enunciated, the 'survival of negation' criterion to give it a name, 'Tom is drunk,' while it implies (entails) that someone is drunk, does not presuppose that someone is drunk.

Therefore, to answer Dave's question, 'imply' (in the sense of 'entails') is not equivalent to 'presuppose.'

Alles klar? Vielleicht nicht!

One could conceivably balk, or baulk in the case of the Bad Ostrich, as follows: It is not clear, or it is false, that if Tom does not regret lying to his wife, then Tom has lied to his wife. The Ostrich could say, "Tom does not regret lying because he didn't lie in the first place."

As you can see, the topic of presupposition is a murky one, and part of the murkiness is due to the fact that presupposition is at the interface of the semantic and pragmatic, and it is not clear how they gear into each other, if you will excuse the mixed metaphors.

Another Round on (Semantic) Presupposition: An Inconsistent Pentad

Ed writes,

p = *Socrates has just stopped talking*

q = *Socrates was talking just now*

1. p presupposes q

2. If p presupposes q, then (p or not-p) entails q

3. It is necessary that p or not-p

4. It is necessary that q

5. It is not necessary that Socrates was talking just now

We agree with (1) in some sense. In (2), we try to sharpen that sense, i.e. of ‘presupposition’. (3) is a logical truth. So is (4): if the antecedent is necessary, so is the consequent. (5) is obviously true (unless we hold the necessity of the past, but the example could be changed with the same problematic result).

My feeling is that we are not being sharp enough about ‘presupposition’. What exactly is it?

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The above propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. But there is a philosophical problem only if all of the propositions are plausible. (2), however, is not at all plausible and seems to reflect a blunder on Ed' s part. The idea behind semantic presupposition is that if p presupposes q, then both p and its negation entail q. What Ed should have written is

2* If p presupposes q, and p is true, then p entails q, and if p is false, then not-p entails q.

For example, if I stop talking at time t, then my stopping entails my talking immediately before t; if I keep talking at t, then that also entails my talking immediately before t. The proposition presupposed is the same whether I stop talking or keep talking.

Clearly (2) and (2*) are different propositions. So I solve the pentad by rejecting (2) and its consequences.

More on Assertion and Presupposition

I continue to worry this technical bone, which is not a mere technicality, inasmuch as the topic of presupposition opens out upon some very Big Questions indeed. Anyway, back to work. I thank Ed Buckner for getting me going on this.

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It should be obvious that one does not assert everything that the content of one's assertion entails. If I assert that Venus is a planet, I do not thereby assert that either Venus is a planet or Putin is a former KGB agent, even though the content of my assertion entails the disjunctive proposition. The content of an assertion is a proposition, and for any proposition p, p entails p v q.

A more interesting, and more difficult, question is whether one asserts any proposition that the content of one's assertion entails (apart from the proposition that is the content of the assertion).

Suppose you ask who won the 10K Turkey Trot and I assert that Tony won the race. Do I thereby also assert that he competed in it? That he competed in it is entailed by the fact that he won. And it is entailed in a stronger sense that the sense in which Venus is a planet entails Venus is a planet or Putin is a former KGB agent. For there is a semantic connection between winning and competing, but no semantic connection in the Venus-Putin case. You could say that it is analytically impossible that Tony win without competing: what makes it true that there is no possible world in which Tony wins but does not compete is the semantic connection between winning and competing.

Still, I want to say that Tony's competing is presupposed but not asserted when I assert that he won the race. Necessarily, anything red is colored. But when I assert that Tom the tomato is red, I do not thereby assert that it is colored, although of course I presuppose that it is colored. Note the word 'thereby.' It is no doubt possible for me to assert that Tom is colored, a 'vegetable of color' if you will, but that is a different assertion.

Go back to Tony the runner. That Tony did not cheat by taking a short cut is analytically entailed by the fact that he won. (To win a foot race it does not suffice to be the first to cross the finish line. Remember Rosie Ruiz of Boston Marathon 1980 notoriety?) Will you say that when I assert that Tony won the race I also thereby assert that he did not cheat by taking a shortcut? I would say No. For that would be an unbearably counter-intuitive thing to say. I presuppose, but do not assert, that Tony did not cheat by taking a shortcut

You can see how this series of questions can be extended. One can cheat by getting a head start or by jumping in at mid-course, which is what Rosie Ruiz did at Boston. You can cheat by hiring a a world-class doppelgaenger, by wearing special shoes . . . .

Note also that if Tony won, it follows that he either won or didn't win. Will you say that when I assert that Tony won the race I am also thereby asserting that he either won it or didn't? When I assert that Tony won, I am not asserting the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM). At most, LEM is a presupposition of my assertion, and of every assertion.

If Tony won, then it was possible that he win. For everything actual is possible. But when I assert that Tony won, I presuppose, but do not assert, that it was possible at the time of the race that Tony win.

I am toying with a strong thesis:

When an agent A makes an assertion by uttering or otherwise tokening a sentence s (which is typically, but needn't be, in the indicative mood), the content of the assertion is exactly the (Fregean) proposition explicitly expressed by the tokening of s and no other proposition. Propositions other than the content proposition that are entailed by the content proposition are at most presuppositions of the assertion.

Why hold this view? Well, it seems to me that what I assert on any occasion is precisely what I intend to assert on that occasion and nothing else. When I make an assertion I translate into overt speech a belief that I have. The content/accusative of the belief is a Fregean proposition and there is nothing in that proposition that is not open to my mind at the time I express my belief.

Did Kepler Die in Misery?

Either he did or he didn't. Suppose I say that he did, and you say that he didn't. We both presuppose, inter alia, that there was a man named 'Kepler.' Now that proposition that we both presuppose, although entailed both by Kepler died in misery and Kepler did not die in misery is no part of what I assert when I assert that Kepler died in misery.

Why not?

Well, to proceed by reductio, if what I assert when I assert that Kepler died in misery is that (there was a man named 'Kepler' & he died in misery), then what you assert when you contradict me is that (either there was no man named 'Kepler' or that he did not die in misery). But the latter is not what you assert, and the former is not what I assert. That is because we take it for granted that there was a man who rejoiced under the name 'Johannes Kepler.'

What I assert is that Kepler died in misery, and what you assert is that Kepler did not die in misery. But we both presuppose that there was a man named 'Kepler.' The proposition that we both presuppose, while entailed by what we each assert, is not part of what we each assert.

That, I take it, is Frege's famous argument in Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung.

It seems pretty good to me.

Assertion and Presupposition: An Argument for a Distinction

1) Someone, such as Sophomore Sam, who asserts that there are no truths does not assert that there are truths.

And yet

2) That there are no truths entails that there is at least one truth. (Why? Because it is impossible for the first proposition to be true and the second false.)

Therefore

3) If someone S asserts that p, and p entails q, it does not follow that S asserts that q. (Assertion is not closed under entailment.)

4) Although Sam does not ASSERT that there is at least one truth when he assertively utters the sentence 'There are no truths,' he is in some relation to the proposition that there is at least one truth. I will say that he PRESUPPOSES it.

Therefore

5) There is a distinction we need to make and it is reasonably labelled the distinction between ASSERTING a proposition and PRESUPPOSING a proposition. An act of asserting can carry a presupposition that is not asserted. Sam's act of asserting that there are no truths presupposes but does not assert that there is at least one truth.

If you don't accept this argument, tell me which premise(s) you reject and why.

Is Assertion Closed Under Entailment? Assertion and Presupposition

Suppose a person asserts that p. Suppose also that p entails q. Does it follow that the person asserting that p thereby asserts that q? If so, and if p and q are any propositions you like, then assertion is closed under entailment. If assertion is not closed under entailment, then there will be examples in which a person asserts that p, p entails q, but the person does not assert that q.

By 'entailment' I understand a relation between propositions. P entails q iff it is impossible for p to be true, and q false. By 'assertion' I mean a speech act, an act of asserting, a concrete, datable, linguistic performance, not a proposition. By 'the content of an assertion' I mean the proposition expressed when a person makes an assertion. A proposition is not the same as a sentence. 'The war has come to an end' is a sentence in English. 'Der Krieg hat zu Ende gekommen' is a sentence in German. The sentences are different, both at the type level and at the token level. And yet they can both be used to express one and the same thought. That same thought is the proposition. By 'thought' here I do not mean an occurrent episode of thinking, but the accusative (direct object) of such an act of thinking. You could also call it a 'content' although that term is ambiguous for reasons I won't go into now.

Preliminaries aside, back to our question.

That James no longer works for Amazon has among its entailments that James worked for Amazon, that someone named 'James' worked for Amazon, and that someone no longer works for Amazon.

Now suppose I assert that James no longer works for Amazon. Do I thereby assert that James worked for Amazon? I say No.

Here is a more striking example. Sophomore Sam asserts that there are no truths. The content of his act of assertion, namely, the proposition that there are no truths, entails that the content of his assertion is not true. But surely the latter is no part of what Sam asserts.

So assertion is not closed under entailment.

Suppose that Tom asserts that he is glad that Trump beat Hillary. The content of the assertion entails that Trump beat Hillary. But that Trump beat Hillary is not what Tom asserts. We can say that Tom's act of assertion presupposes that Trump beat Hillary. But neither Tom nor his act of assertion is a proposition. So if Tom's act of assertion presupposes that Trump beat Hillary, then presupposition is not a relation between propositions, but a relation between a non-proposition (a person or his speech act) and a proposition.

On the other hand, that Tom is glad that Trump beat Hillary entails that Trump beat Hillary. This is a relation between propositions and it makes some sense to say that the first presupposes the second.

This raises a question. Is presupposition primarily something that people do, or is it primarily a relation between propositions?