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Most philosophers agree that lies are assertions. Most also agree that to presuppose information is different from asserting it. In a series of papers, Viebahn [2020. “Lying with Presuppositions.” Noûs 54 (4): 731–751; “The Lying-Misleading Distinction: A Commitment-Based Approach.” Journal of Philosophy 118 (6): 298–319], along with an empirical study in Viebahn et al. [2021. “Can a Question be a lie? An Empirical Investigation.” Ergo 8 (7): 175–217], has recently argued that one can lie with presuppositions, and therefore one can assert that p by presupposing that p. The latter conclusion is a rejection of a cornerstone of modern philosophy of language and linguistics, and as such we should require strong reasons for accepting it. I argue here that the reasons for thinking that presuppositions can be lies are too weak to motivate giving up either the view that lies are assertions or the traditional distinction between presuppositions and assertions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates that the presuppositions triggered by the 1st and 2nd persons behave differently in important ways from those triggered by the 3rd person and the genders. While the 1st and 2nd persons trigger indexical presuppositions, the 3rd person and the genders do not. I show that the presuppositions triggered by the 1st and 2nd persons are not susceptible to presupposition failure of the kind familiar from ordinary presuppositions. Such failures occur for the 3rd person and the genders. Moreover, the presuppositions triggered by the 1st and 2nd persons do not exhibit the projection behavior of ordinary presuppositions. The 3rd person and the genders do. I sketch a semantics in which the relevant difference is between presuppositions that impose constraints on functions from contexts to intensions (characters) and presuppositions that impose constraints on intensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]