Negation of A Sentence Containing A Presupposition
If presuppositions of a sentence are not consistent with the actual state of affairs, then one of two approaches can be taken. Given the sentences My wife is pregnant and My wife is not pregnant when one has no wife, then either:
- Both the sentence and its negation are false; or
- Strawson's approach: Both "my wife is pregnant" and "my wife is not pregnant" use a wrong presupposition (i.e. that there exists a referent which can be described with the noun phrase my wife) and therefore can not be assigned truth values.
Bertrand Russell tries to solve this dilemma with two interpretations of the negated sentence:
- "There exists exactly one person, who is my wife and who is not pregnant"
- "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.
Read more about this topic: Presupposition
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