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Full Idea
'Background deletion' is the pheomenon that what isn't focused in an answer, what is the background, can be left out of the answer, with the resulting sub-sentential answer nonetheless being appropriate.
Gist of Idea
'Background deletion' is appropriately omitting background from an answer
Source
Thomas Hofweber (Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics [2016], 02.6.2)
Book Ref
Hofweber,Thomas: 'Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics' [OUP 2018], p.45
A Reaction
[I'm struck by the verbosity of this sentence, from an over-long book] It is not unreasonable to think that each conversational exchange has an implicit and agreed domain of quantification. Well, 'focus', then.
Related Idea
Idea 21638 Syntactic form concerns the focus of the sentence, as well as the truth-conditions [Hofweber]
| 24097 | The pragmatics of language is more comprehensible than the meaning [Nietzsche] |
| 18046 | Grice's maxim of quantity says be sufficiently informative [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 18045 | Grice's maxim of quality says do not assert what you believe to be false [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 18044 | Grice's maxim of manner requires one to be as brief as possible [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 10991 | Key conversational maxims are 'quality' (assert truth) and 'quantity' (leave nothing out) [Grice, by Read] |
| 9043 | We use expressions 'deferentially', to conform to the use of other people [Evans] |
| 14718 | An assertion is an attempt to rule out certain possibilities, narrowing things down for good planning [Stalnaker, by Schroeter] |
| 3169 | A simple chaining device can't build sentences containing 'either..or', or 'if..then' [Rey] |
| 21639 | 'Background deletion' is appropriately omitting background from an answer [Hofweber] |
| 18042 | The infelicitiousness of trivial falsity is explained by expectations, or the loss of a context-set [Magidor] |
| 18043 | The infelicitiousness of trivial truth is explained by uninformativeness, or a static context-set [Magidor] |