Presupposition Consider the following famous example from Bertrand Russell. The present king of France is bald. According to Russell, (1) is false because it asserts the existence of the present king of France. However, following P. F. Strawson (1952),...

Self-evident (implicit) assumption about the sense of a linguistic expression or utterance. The term, taken from the analytical philosophy of language (Frege, Russell, Strawson), has been the subject of intensive debate in linguistics since 1970 and...

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Entailment, Presupposition, and Implicature Entailment, as used by philosophers, is a term of art that, unlike logical consequence, lacks a precise definition that is consistently adhered to by those who employ it. Throughout much of the twentieth...

In linguistics, a presupposition is background belief, relating to an utterance,...

Slavoj Zizek, ed. Cogito and the Unconscious. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998. 279 pp. $49.95 cloth; $ 18.95 paper. I start from the obviously basic premise that most readers of this review would like to get some information about Cogito and the...

In his presidential address to the American Society of Church History in 1920, Robert Hastings Nichols observed that he had discovered, in his reading of previous addresses, "no mention of the reading of a paper dealing with what is the occupation of almost...

A little more than a week into Michael Bloomberg’s pseudo-campaign for president, the inevitable backlash has begun. In accordance with the conventions of counterintuition, the on-second-thought analysis focuses not on the Mayor’s obvious disadvantages—the history of third-party candidates, his lack of national party organization, his...

Alfred McCoy titled his book A Question of Torture. Heaven knows why. He doesn’t ask any questions. Instead, he just piles up assertions intended to demonstrate that the C.I.A. has conducted a sustained campaign of torture since the 1950’s. This was top secret, of course,...