Presuppons

Presuppons is a term that appears in some discussions of language and argumentation to denote the implicit background assumptions embedded in a statement. In mainstream linguistics and philosophy of language, the standard term is presupposition; presuppons may be used as a nonstandard variant or by particular communities.

A presuppon is an implicit proposition that must be true for a statement to be coherent or meaningful in its context. It lies outside the explicit content of the assertion but constrains how the utterance is interpreted and whether it is considered appropriate or acceptable. Presuppons are often resistant to negation or revision; a sentence can be negated while still carrying its presupposed background.

Common examples illustrate the idea. The sentence “John stopped smoking” presupposes that John used to smoke. “The king of France is bald” presupposes that there exists a current king of France. “Sandra regretted paying the bill” can presuppose that a bill was paid at some point or that there was an act of payment to consider.

Identification and testing methods include the negation test and the question test. If a background assumption remains when the sentence is negated, it is frequently treated as a presupposition. For example, negating “John stopped smoking” as “John did not stop smoking” preserves the presupposition that John smoked in the past. Contextual change and discourse analysis are also used to detect presuppons in longer passages.

Relation to related concepts is important. Presuppons are closely linked to presuppositions, with the key distinction often being terminological rather than theoretical. In practice, the term presuppons is rarely used in formal literature, and readers should consider standard terminology when consulting scholarly sources.