Factives in false-belief contexts

9/19/2024: Talk at SuB29, C.U.M.O. @Noto, Italy.

Title: Why regret and realize embed false beliefs

Abstract, slides, and proceeding paper.

I offer a believe-based account to explain the defeasibility of factive presuppositions observed with emotive factives (e.g. regret) and verbs of discovery (e.g. realize) in false-belief contexts. Assuming that these predicates are lexically non-factive, I propose an account with two ingredients: (a) a backgrounding operator that turns a proposition into an embedded presupposition within the lexical semantics of regret/realize, and (b) a theory of presupposition projection in attitude contexts (Karttunen 1974, Heim 1992, Sudo 2014) that derives the factive inference as a pragmatic implicature. I argue that this pragmatic mechanism is context-sensitive, while the factive inference of know is a lexical presupposition that holds across contexts.