An alternative to Presuppositional Exhaustification: Supervaluationist RSA

Abstract

It has been recently argued that exhaustification (the mechanism responsible for deriving scalar implicatures and other exhaustivity effects) should be viewed as generating trivalent meanings, with the effect that scalar implicatures are, in some sense, presupposed (Bassi et al. 2021; Wehbe and Doron 2024). In this paper, I argue that (a) presuppositional exhaustification fails to derive correct felicity conditions in certain cases, and (b) one can replace presuppositional exhaustification with a probabilistic pragmatics account that includes a bivalent exhaustivity operator. Strong Kleene-like behavior is derived on the basis of general principles of rational communication, and adequate felicity conditions are predicted – I call this account, following Cremers et al. (2023), the Supervaluationist RSA account.