Common Ground

Paul Grice's (1989) use of the term common ground to refer to background information presumed to be shared by participants in a conversation is argued to highlight the social character of speaker presuppositions, the abstract structure of which is clarified by introducing a simplifying assumption that identifies common ground with common belief. The logic of common belief is formalized in a highly idealized semantic framework that identifies belief with truth in all doxastic alternatives, which are represented by a binary relation of accessibility for each believer. Common beliefs & individuals' beliefs about common beliefs are derived from ordinary individual beliefs, & presupposition accommodation is characterized as a natural kind of belief change; a notion of common ground is developed in terms of acceptance to allow for divergence between common ground & common belief due to accommodation to a recognition of defective contexts. 24 References. J. Hitchcock