in which Dave talked about inferences re questions:
The British philosopher R. G. Collingwood constructed a "Doctrine of
Absolute Presuppositions". In his "An Essay on Metaphysics", Collingwood
wrote:
"Whenever anybody states a thought in words, there are a great many more
thoughts in his mind than there are expressed in his statement. Among
these there are some which stand in a peculiar relation ato the thought he
has stated; they are not merely its context, they are its
presuppositions."
A generalization of that idea was set forth by Isabel Hungerford in her
paper "Contextual Implication" published in the journal INQUIRY in 1960.
If anyone is interested in pursuing these ideas further, you could get a
copy of Paper No. 4, Graduate Studies, Texas Tech Univ., Lubbock, July,
1973 for a couple of bucks, probably.
Kenter, at Texas Tech, has been involved in a Peirce center for a long
time, and uses this paper to explore assumptions and their significance in
depth.
>From my perspective, this work is very fundamental to human
communication, technical writing, and many other subjects where "user
friendliness" is important.
-- JOHN WARFIELD Johnwfield@aol.com