Insemantics,pragmatics, andphilosophy of language, thecommon ground of a conversation is the set ofpropositions that theinterlocutors have agreed to treat as true. For a proposition to be in the common ground, it must becommon knowledge in the conversational context. The set ofpossible worlds compatible with the common ground is often called thecontext set.[1][2][3][4]
The concept is fundamental to many theories of discourse. In such theories, thespeech act ofassertion is often analyzed as a proposal to add an additional proposition to the common ground. Similarly,presuppositions are taken to be licensed when they are already established in the common ground. While such approaches are typically construed aspragmatic, the framework ofdynamic semantics treats the semanticdenotations of sentences as functions which update the common ground.[1][2][3][4] In many theories, the common ground is one of several elements of theconversational scoreboard.[5]
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