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In linguistics, a presupposition is background belief, relating to an utterance, that: In pragmatics, a presupposition is an assumption about the world whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Examples of presuppositions include: Crucially, negation of an expression does not change its presuppositions: I want to do it again and I don't want to do it again both mean that the subject has done it already one or more times; My wife is pregnant and My wife is not pregnant both mean that the subject has a wife. In this respect, presupposition is distinguished from entailment and implication. For example, The president was assassinated entails that The president is dead, but if the expression is negated, the entailment is not necessarily true.
Negation of a sentence containing a presupposition If presuppositions of a sentence are not consistent with the actual state of affairs, then one of two approaches can be taken. Given the sentences My wife is pregnant and My wife is not pregnant when one has no wife, then either: Russell tries to solve this dilemma with two interpretations of the negated sentence: For the first phrase, Russell would claim that it is false, whereas the second would be true according to him. Other uses of the term Critical discourse analysis identifies the ideological function of presuppositions, particularly in the concept of synthetic personalisation. In epistemology, presuppositions relate to a belief system, or Weltanschauung, and are required for it to make sense. A variety of Christian apologetics, called presuppositional apologetics, argues that the existence or non-existence of God is the basic presupposition of all human thought, and that all men arrive at a worldview which is ultimately determined by the theology they presuppose. Evidence and arguments are only marshalled after the fact in an attempt to justify the theological assumptions already made. According to this view, it is impossible to demonstrate the existence of God unless one presupposes that God exists; modern science is incapable of discovering the supernatural because it relies on methodological naturalism and thereby fashions a Procrustean bed which rejects any observation which would disprove the naturalistic assumption. The best the apologist can do is to argue that the resulting worldview is somehow inconsistent with itself (for example, via the Argument from morality or via the Transcendental argument for the existence of God). | ||||||||
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