Can you imagine that you are healthy?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Nov 9 00:32:35 UTC 2007


At 7:16 PM -0500 11/8/07, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>I keep getting spam with "Can you imagine that you are healthy?" in the
>subject line.
>
>I find this question disturbing. It seems to presuppose both that I am not
>healthy and that I am healthy.
>
>Is there a name for this kind of contradiction in presupposition?
>
I'm not sure I see the contradiction.  The spam presupposing that
you're not healthy (to the extent that one is not asked to imagine
that p holds if p does in fact hold), or at least no healthier than
required to read your e-mail.  How does it presuppose that you're
healthy?

LH

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