Theories of presupposition in the tradition associated with Karttunen, Stalnaker and Heim relate presupposition satisfaction to the content of conversational participants’ epistemic states, usually modeled as sets of worlds. However, converging evidence from recent work on modality and from other areas of cognitive science suggests that epistemic states are better thought of as having the riche...

This essay provides a brief introduction to the topic of presupposition, and then discuses three major approaches to this phenomenon, focusing on the answers which each approach gives to two foundational questions: What is presupposition? And how, or why, does it arise? 1. The phenomenon Consider sentence (1): (1) Jane has stopped drinking coffee in the evening. Among other things, this sentenc...