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  • must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context

  • Will generally remain a necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial, or question, and

  • can be associated with a specific lexical item or grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in the utterance.


In Pragmatics , a presupposition is an assumption about the world whose truth is taken for granted in Discourse . Examples of presuppositions include:
  • ''Do you want to do it again?''

  • ---Presupposition: You have done it already, at least once.


  • ''My wife is pregnant.''

  • ---Presupposition: The speaker has a wife.


Crucially, 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.

If presuppositions of a sentence do not comply with the actual state of affairs, then both the sentence and its negation are false.

Different opinion:

It is certainly not the case, that both a sentence and its negation can be false at the same time.

Strawsons approach: if the speaker has no wife both "my wife is pregnant" and "my wife is not pregnant" use a wrong presupposition and therefore can not be assigned to truth values.

Russell tries to solve this problems with two interpretations of the negated sentence:

1."There exists exactly one person, who is my wife and who is not pregnant(lucky me)"

2."There does not exist exactly one person, who is my wife and who is pregnant."

For the first phrase, Russell would claim that it is false, whereas the second would be true according to him.

In a formal notation the structure of the sentence gets clearer: P: It exist a person A, A is my wife and A is pregnant and there is only one person A refers to. The logical negation of P would be ¬ P. ¬ P can be true for several reasons, which would not mean that one of this reasons would be the negation of P. For example the speaker not having a wife makes ¬ P true, but is nor logical negation of P.

To sum up, the negation of the sentence "My wife is pregnant" is not "My wife is not pregnant", but "it is not true, that my wife is pregnant". This means if P is false ¬ P is true no matter for which reason P is false (possible reasons: the speaker has no wife, there are more than one wife or his wife is not pregnant).

Critical Discourse Analysis identifies the ideological function of presuppositions, particularly in the concept of Synthetic Personalisation .

In Epistemology presuppositions relate to a belief system and are required for it to make sense. Presuppositions form our worldview. The first presupposition we all make is either "there is a god" or "there is no god." From this point, every circumstance and fact we analyze will be categorized to prove one or the other point. A Christian presupposes that there will be life after death. For this reason, he tempers his actions more toward charity and obedience to God.