User:Ormond Uren

Assumptology

Some years ago I went to a conference on "presuppositions". I thought this was great, because I was very interested in the assumptions behind what people said and told one of the organisers that I thought there should be a discipline called "assumptology" (a barbarous word, which nevertheless conveys quite clearly what I meant). The conference was disappointing: it dealt with technical grammatical-type details of what is presupposed by sentences. I was more interested in the whole background of what people are taking for granted every time they open their mouths, or listen to someone else who does. Not "what is this person saying?", but "what is this person assuming for him/her (deference to PC) to be saying that?" This leads to a further, and more important, development: "what am I assuming when I say this or that?" This strikes me as a field of study worthy of attention in its own right.