Illocutionary Silencing

Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby have argued that pornography might create a climate whereby a woman's ability to refuse sex is literally silenced or removed. Their central argument is that a failure of 'uptake' of the woman's intention means that the illocutionary speech act of refusal has not taken place. In this paper, I challenge the claims from the Austinian philosophy of language which feature in this argument. I argue that uptake is not in general required for illocution, nor is it required for refusal in particular. I conclude with remarks on the relationship between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech-acts.     

Illocutionary harm

Philosophical Studies - A number of philosophers have become interested in the ways that individuals are subject to harm as the performers of illocutionary acts. This paper offers an account of the...     

Existence,Negation, and Abstraction in the Neoplatonic Hierarchy 1

The paper is a study of the logic of existence, negation, and order in the Neoplatonic tradition. The central idea is that Neoplatonists assume a logic in which the existence predicate is a comparative adjective and in which monadic predicates function as scalar adjectives that nest the background order. Various scalar predicate negations are then identifiable with various Neoplatonic negations, including a privative negation appropriate for the lower orders of reality and a hyper-negation appropriate for the higher. Reversion to the One can then be explained as the logical inference of hyper-negations from mundane knowledge. Part I develops the relevant linguistic and logical theory, and Part II defends Wolfson and the scalar interpretation against the more traditional Aristotelian understanding of Whittaker and others of reversion as intensional abstraction     

The Revival of Rejective Negation

Whether assent (acceptance) and dissent (rejection) are thought of as speech acts or as propositional attitudes, the leading idea of rejectivism is that a grasp of the distinction between them is prior to our understanding of negation as a sentence operator, this operator then being explicable as applying to A to yield something assent to which is tantamount to dissent from A. Widely thought to have been refuted by an argument of Frege"s, rejectivism has undergone something of a revival in recent years, especially in writings by Huw Price and Timothy Smiley. While agreeing that Frege"s argument does not refute the position, we shall air some philosophical qualms about it in Section 5, after a thorough examination of the formal issues in Sections 1–4. This discussion draws on – and seeks to draw attention to – some pertinent work of Kent Bendall in the 1970s.     

相干否定与经典否定

在情境中使用的否定,是相干否定;在世界中使用的否定,是经典否定。我首先给定了两个逻辑,一个是信息的基础相干逻辑L_1,另一个是与L_1联系紧密的逻辑系L_2。其中,L_2被同时包含世界和情境两者的类模型所刻画。当我们只考虑某个L_2模型中包含情境的部分(连同可达关系,不相容关系,以及可分辨情境的集合)时,我们将得到一个L_1的模型结构。在给定了一些关联L_1的模型结构与可能世界的直觉条件后,我们得到了一类特殊的模型——被这类模型刻画的逻辑可以合理地将相干否定与经典否定关联,并且允许我们认为此二者是相容的。在这篇文章中,我首先给定了一个简单的信息逻辑——一个非常弱的相干逻辑。然后,我尝试对其中的命题联结词的真值条件使用经典的处理。以上处理我分两步完成。首先,使用Routley-Meyer的语义以及相关的信息解释。然后,我给出了另一个能够整合环境(或情境)与可能世界之间关系的逻辑。这一关系,可以理解为信息与真之间的形而上的关联。在文章的最后,我将指出在在相干逻辑中整合经典否定的好处。     

Slurs as Illocutionary Force Indicators

Philosophia - Slurs are derogatory words and they are used to derogate certain groups. Theories of slurs must explain why they are derogatory words, as well as other features like independence and...     

A Partial Defense of Illocutionary Silencing

Catharine MacKinnon has pioneered a new brand of anti‐pornography argument. In particular, MacKinnon claims that pornography silences women in a way that violates their right to free speech. In what follows, we focus on a certain account of silencing put forward by Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton, and we defend that account against two important objections. The first objection contends that this account makes a crucial but false assumption about the necessary role of hearer recognition in successful speech acts. In response, we argue that, as silencing primarily concerns communication, Hornsby and Langton are perfectly correct to treat hearer recognition as they do. The second objection contends that their particular account of silencing has the unacceptable result of undermining the responsibility of rapists. We here argue that no such result follows from their account.     

The Role of Negation in Conditional Inference

This paper addresses the issue of how negative components affect people's ability to draw conditional inferences. The study was motivated by an attempt to resolve a difficulty for the mental models theory of Johnson-Laird and Byrne, whose account of matching bias in the selection task is apparently inconsistent with Johnson-Laird's explanation of the double negation effects in conditional inference reported by Evans, Clibbens, and Rood (1995). Two experiments are reported, which investigate frequencies of conditional inferences with task presentation similar to that of the selection task in two respects: the presence of a picture of four cards and the use of implicit negations in the premises. The latter variable was shown to be critical and demonstrated a new phenomenon: Conditional inferences of all kinds are substantially suppressed when based on implicitly negative premises. This phenomenon was shown to operate independently of and in addition to the double negation effect. A third experiment showed that the implicit negation effect could be extended to the paradigm in which people are asked to produce their own conclusions. It is argued that these two effects can be explained within either the mental models theory or the inference rule theory, of propositional reasoning, but that each will require some revision in order to offer a convincing account.     

Nelson's Negation on the Base of Weaker Versions of Intuitionistic Negation

Constructive logic with Nelson negation is an extension of the intuitionistic logic with a special type of negation expressing some features of constructive falsity and refutation by counterexample. In this paper we generalize this logic weakening maximally the underlying intuitionistic negation. The resulting system, called subminimal logic with Nelson negation, is studied by means of a kind of algebras called generalized N-lattices. We show that generalized N-lattices admit representation formalizing the intuitive idea of refutation by means of counterexamples giving in this way a counterexample semantics of the logic in question and some of its natural extensions. Among the extensions which are near to the intuitionistic logic are the minimal logic with Nelson negation which is an extension of the Johansson's minimal logic with Nelson negation and its in a sense dual version — the co-minimal logic with Nelson negation. Among the extensions near to the classical logic are the well known 3-valued logic of Lukasiewicz, two 12-valued logics and one 48-valued logic. Standard questions for all these logics — decidability, Kripke-style semantics, complete axiomatizability, conservativeness are studied. At the end of the paper extensions based on a new connective of self-dual conjunction and an analog of the Lukasiewicz middle value ½ have also been considered.     

Hegel's Glutty Negation

Some authors have claimed that Hegel's ‘determinate negation’ should be distinguished from ‘logical’ or ‘formal’ negation, that is, from a view of negation as a contradictory forming operator. In contrast, I argue that dialectical determinate negation involves a view of negation as a contradictory forming operator, and can therefore count as formal negation in every respect. However, as it is clear in contemporary glutty semantics of negation, one may distinguish between different accounts of the relationship between negation, contradiction and content. I suggest that, differently from classical negation, and as glutty negation, dialectical negation has partial content.     

An Illocutionary Logical Explanation of the Surprise Execution

This paper further develops the system of illocutionary logic presented in ‘Propositional logic of supposition and assertion’ (Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 1997, 38, 325-349) to accommodate an ‘I believe that’ operator and resolve Moore's Paradox. This resolution is accomplished by providing both a truth-conditional and a commitment-based semantics. An important feature of the logical system is that the correctness of some arguments depends on who it is that makes the argument. The paper then shows that the logical system can be expanded to resolve the surprise execution paradox puzzle. The prisoner's argument showing that he can't be executed by surprise is correct but his beliefs are incoherent. The judge's beliefs (and our beliefs) about this situation are not incoherent.     

Negation of Park's transformations

Zusammenfassung Parks Kritik beruht, meiner Ansicht nach, auf einem entscheidenden Mißverständnis meiner Intentionen: es geht mir überhaupt nicht um eine Argumentation gegen eine Transformationsgrammatik à la Chomsky, und nicht einmal in erster Linie gegen die Absicht mancher Psycholinguisten, eine derartige Theorie in ihren psychischen Funktionen aufzuzeigen. Ich möchte lediglich dafür plädieren, daß die Psycholinguistik in erster Linie psychologische (und nicht linguistische) Überlegungen und Modellvorstellungen als Leitlinien verwendet.     

Notes on Constructive Negation

We put together several observations on constructive negation. First, Russell anticipated intuitionistic logic by clearly distinguishing propositional principles implying the law of the excluded middle from remaining valid principles. He stated what was later called Peirce’s law. This is important in connection with the method used later by Heyting for developing his axiomatization of intuitionistic logic. Second, a work by Dragalin and his students provides easy embeddings of classical arithmetic and analysis into intuitionistic negationless systems. In the last section, we present in some detail a stepwise construction of negation which essentially concluded the formation of the logical base of the Russian constructivist school. Markov’s own proof of Markov’s principle (different from later proofs by Friedman and Dragalin) is described.     

以言行事观念下的句法学、语义学和语用学

语力逻辑系统既包括本体层面,与真及成真条件有关,也包括认知层面,与以言行事的语力和行为有关。语力逻辑系统可以通过往标准的逻辑系统中添加施事性算子而得到。通过提供一个联系着以言行事的行为的理性承诺的解释,并且通过形成以旅事性行为为前提和结论的自然演绎的推理系统,这类算子标示了以言行事的语力。本文利用一个简单的处理了断言、否定、假设的语力逻辑系统,证明经过恰当的考虑,对以言行事的语力和理性承诺的研究属于语义学,而不属于语用学。这一论证依赖于这样的事实,即表达式的赋值函项可被同时用于处理语力逻辑系统的本体和认知层面,在这两种情况下,这些函项都为建立恰当性和完全性的结果提供了基础。句法学研究的是表达式的结构,而语义学关心的则是语言使用者的意义,无论这些意义是不是习规上的意义。剩下的第三项研究,即所谓语用学,考察的是语言行为的意义是如何被说话者传达给听者的。     

Negation on the Australian Plan

Journal of Philosophical Logic - We present and defend the Australian Plan semantics for negation. This is a comprehensive account, suitable for a variety of different logics. It is based on two...     

Airless Worlds: The Traumatic Sequelae of Identification with Parental Negation

In this paper I propose the phrase “living in an airless world” to characterize the intrapsychic situation when a child has grown up in circumstances of extreme parental negation (non-recognition). Of the two major dynamics Ferenczi identified as the sequelae of early trauma—“identification with the aggressor” and “splitting of the personality” (dissociation)—the latter has received far more attention in the relational literature than the former. I seek to correct that imbalance by examining in depth the phenomenon of identification with the other’s response to the self—especially its most toxic form, identification with parental negation. Airless world syndrome involves a kind of identificatory bondage to the internalized negating other which is disabling to the senses of self and personal agency and impairs the capacities to think, feel in an integrated way, separate and grieve. Consequently, for patients living in airless worlds, the central unconscious need and preoccupation is to convert their actual parents into true parents who will finally recognize their subjective experience and needs, thereby allowing them, for the first time, psychically to breathe. This understanding, in turn, has implications for how we think about the analytic field in relation to the patient’s developmental, parent-child field. The therapeutic implications of this model are described and illustrated with three clinical examples.