Capitulaciones: marco jurídico del proceso de Conquista (1492-1591)

Stalnaker’s notion of context plays a fundamental role in his broader theoretical project of offering a detailed pragmatic account of how speech acts, and in particular assertions, impact the state of information in which they occur. In the initial presentation of his framework, Stalnaker (1978) notes four “truisms about assertions” that guide the formulation of his theory. First, acts of assertions express propositions, each of which represents a certain possible state of the world. Second, each act of assertion occurs in a context, “a situation that includes a speaker with certain beliefs and intentions, and some people with their own beliefs and intentions to whom the assertion is addressed” (p. 78). Third, the content of a proposition expressed by an act of assertion can depend

on features of the context in which it occurs such as “who is speaking or when the act of assertion takes place” (p. 78). And lastly, the purpose of an act of assertion is to change the state of information that forms the background against which the act occurs, specifically the beliefs of the addressees of the act, though of course, “how the assertion affects the context will depend on its content” (p. 78).

8 _{Regretably, Kaplan himself does not discuss any such assumptions. See Caplan (2003) and Predelli}

4.2 Two Notions of Context | 111

Stalnaker articulates a number of theoretical concepts that together allow for a more precise description and explanation of these truisms, the most important of which, for our purposes, is the common ground between conversational participants. The common ground is comprised of whatever propositions are mutually presupposed by

the parties to a conversation.9 That is, the only propositions that are in the_common

ground are those that the speaker presupposes her addressee(s) to presuppose, that

the speaker presupposes her addressee(s) to presuppose the speaker presupposes, that the speaker presupposes her addressee(s) to presuppose the speaker presupposes her addressee(s) to presuppose, etc.

Stalnaker qualifies the intended notion of presupposition as follows.

The propositions presupposed in the intended sense need not really be common or mutual knowledge; the speaker need not even believe them. He may presuppose any proposition that he finds it convenient to assume for the purpose of the conversation, provided he is prepared to assume that his audience will assume it along with them. (p. 84).

More recently, Stalnaker (2014) has defined the common ground in terms of an attitude of “acceptance for the purposes of the conversation” which he suggests is structurally similar to belief (p. 123). The state of information in which assertions and other speech acts occur is characterized by the propositions that are mutually presupposed, in this sense, and hence need not be true, since the participants might be mistaken about the facts of the situation they find themselves in, or be operating under the pretense of a hypothetical or counterfactual situation in accord with the purpose of the conversation.

Stalnaker endorses a possible worlds account of propositions according to which a proposition is a function from possible worlds to truth-values, or, equivalently, just the set of possible worlds in which it is true. As such, even though the state of information in which an assertion occurs is comprised of propositions, namely those that are presupposed by the conversational participants, “the more fundamental way of representing the speaker’s presuppositions is [. . . ] as a set of possible worlds, the possible worlds compatible with what is presupposed,” which Stalnaker calls thecontext set (p. 84). Thus defined, the context set consists of all of the ways the world could

be that are not ruled out by what the conversational participants mutually assume about their occurrent situation – the “live options”, as it were, for which world they are

9 _{Stalnaker characterizes this kind of presupposition in terms of the dispositions of speaker-hearers:}

“A proposition is presupposed if the speaker is disposed to act as if he assumes or believes that the proposition is true, and as if he assumes or believes that his audience assumes or believes that it is true as well” (p. 84).

located in. Accordingly, we can “[t]hink of a state of a context at any given moment as defined by the presuppositions of the participants as represented by their context sets” (p. 86).

On Stalnaker’s account, the general purpose of conversation is to modulate the

context set in a way that allows the participants to situate themselves amongst the “live

options”. Assertion, in particular, affects the context set in two ways. First, whenever one conversational participant speaks, uttering certain expressions in a certain manner, this information is immediately incorporated into the context set, so long as it is

mutually assumed to be accessible to the participants. For example, facts about who is speaking “can be exploited in the conversation, as when Daniels says ‘I am bald’, taking it for granted that his audience can figure out who is being said to be bald” (p. 86). The second way in which the context set is affected by an assertion is by

incorporating the proposition expressed by the assertion, so long as the assertion is not rejected by any of the conversational participants. In such a way, the act of assertion updates the context set by eliminating the possible worlds that are not compatible

with the proposition expressed. So if Daniels’s assertion is accepted, than the updated

context set is one that no longer includes any possible worlds in which Daniels is not

bald.