Robert C. Stalnaker (1978), in Peter Cole (ed.), Pragmatics (Syntax and Semantics 9), New York: Academic Press, pp. 315–332 — DOI-10.1163/9789004368873_013
Key takeaways
Filed, not read: no lawful full text was reachable (see the history note). What the essay says is known here only as three works read on 2026-10-09 state or quote it:
- Per Krifka (LIT-835, §2.1): the common ground is modelled by context sets, “sets c of world-time indices i that represent the ways how the world could be like at the current time, according to the information that the participants assume to be shared (Stalnaker, 1978)”, and informing that φ restricts c to the indices where φ holds. Krifka adds that Stalnaker (1978, 2002) noticed, informally, that an assertion’s update depends on the addressee’s acceptance and not on brute force.
- As quoted by Heim (LIT-838, ch. III §1.4, citing pp. 321 and 323 of the essay; read in Heim, not in Stalnaker): speaker presuppositions are “the propositions whose truth he takes for granted as part of the background of the conversation”, what is taken to be the “COMMON GROUND of the participants”; they “need not really be common or mutual knowledge”. An assertion changes the context in two ways: by the manifest fact that it is made, which the context on which its essential effect operates already includes, and by its content: “To make an assertion is to reduce the context set in a particular way, provided that there are no objections from the other participants … all of the possible situations incompatible with what is said are eliminated … This effect is avoided only if the assertion is rejected.” Heim adopts this and argues the context set is too coarse to predict how a common ground changes.
- Per Veltman (LIT-818, fn. 1): the notion that a sentence’s meaning is the change it makes to an information state “can be traced back to Robert Stalnaker’s work on presupposition and assertion”; he cites Stalnaker 1974 (“Pragmatic presuppositions”) rather than this essay.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-09 at the owner’s request from the manuscript
bibliography of 2026-10-09 (work what-survives-translation), which
considered it and dropped it from the final reference list, as one of
the dynamic-semantics works (with Heim, LIT-838, and Veltman) the
exchange named. See the curation entry of that day.
Unavailable because no lawful full text was reachable, so it is not read
and no NOTE is filed.
What a reading should check. Whether the essay states the context set and the elimination effect of assertion in the form Krifka uses, or only the common ground with the update left informal; how it handles an assertion whose content depends on the context it changes (the two- dimensional “diagonal” proposal it is known for); and what it says about the hearer’s acceptance, which Krifka credits to it.