presup
Presup is short for presupposition, a thing someone assumes is true before they even start talking. People use it in arguments or in therapy to notice what someone is taking for granted without saying it out loud.
What a model may hear
- linguistic presupposition formal semantics, pragmatics, NLP
- treat the word as a trigger for entailment checks, presupposition projection, or discourse parsing
- database presupposition AI knowledge bases, logic programming
- assume closed-world reasoning or default truths that must hold for a query to run
- prompt injection marker jailbreak communities, adversarial ML
- flag the surrounding text as a hidden premise to be accepted without scrutiny
Where people and models part ways
“What are the presups in this argument?”
Meant: What hidden assumptions is this person not admitting?
May be taken as: Run formal presupposition analysis and return logical structures instead of everyday assumptions
Say instead: “What is this person assuming without saying? List the unstated beliefs.”
“Check my presups”
Meant: Help me notice my own blind assumptions
May be taken as: Validate or compute presuppositions against a knowledge graph
Say instead: “What am I assuming here that I have not examined?”
“This has bad presup”
Meant: This statement sneaks in something false or loaded
May be taken as: Score the presupposition for projection behavior or trigger type
Say instead: “This statement assumes something false or unfair without admitting it.”
Tips
- Say unstated assumption instead of presup if you want plain discussion
- Add about people or about language to steer toward the right domain
- Ask what is being taken for granted to keep the model in ordinary reasoning
- Say formal semantics or linguistics explicitly if you want technical analysis
- Avoid presup as a verb; models parse it less reliably than the noun form
Often confused with
- assume
- more general, less tied to language analysis
- imply
- suggests something follows, not something taken as given
- prerequisite
- a required condition, not a hidden belief
- premise
- stated openly, not silently assumed
- entailment
- a logical must-follow, not a background assumption