Abstract:
During the last decade, increased activity around the semantic-pragmatics boundary has re-emphasised the need to address the role of context in the
interpretation process of human language. This trend has been driven mainly by attempts to develop formal approaches dealing with typically pragmatic
phenomena. In particular for presupposition, the pragmatic phenomenon par excellence, several accounts have given firm evidence of the impact of context.
Invariably, traditional contextual models run into severe problems caused by the consequences of Possible Worlds based notions of propositionhood, which
prevents the formulation of partial, revisable information states. Starting from a notion of proposition developed in Property Theory, we develop a formal
model of contexts as partial beliefs entertained by agents, who do not necessarily hold compatible views. We show how this model can be exploited in the
treatment of the projection problem for conditionals. We demonstrate that a model along these lines does not suffer from the usual disadvantages.

 In: Proceedings of the International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT-97), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, February
4-6, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Ed., pp. 66-74.

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