Truth and reference in context

In communicative exchanges, sentences are uttered against a background of shared beliefs or attitudes that helps the audience to determine the content of what the speaker has said. Unfortunately, different agents may have different views of this common ground. From this standpoint, one of the most familiar phenomena is accommodation, which enables the addressee to incorporate the speaker’s presuppositions into her own view of the common ground. This phenomenon is analyzed here as a case of global context shift, since the missing piece of information, which the addressee is willing to share, will be an integral part of the revised context. A less familiar, but equally important, phenomenon is what I call discommodation, whose main feature consists in the fact that the missing piece of information, although essential to the comprehension of the utterance, cannot be shared by the addressee because it sounds problematic or even false to her. This is not a marginal aspect of communicative exchanges, which are often characterized not only by different views of the common ground, but also by incompatible views. In such cases the addressee opens a “presuppositional slot” to take into account the assumptions that serve to select the reference of the noun phrase, but that are not incorporated into the revised context because of the addressee’s disagreement. Thus, such a process is analyzed as a case of local context shift, which affects only the noun phrase and which, unlike global context shifts, allows us to keep considerations about reference distinct from considerations about truth. One of the main purposes of the paper is to propose a definition of truth (with respect to a presuppositional apparatus) that does not ignore the role of discommodation when different views of the common ground are involved.