Another negation of negation

In discussing questions of free will, Soviet philosophers fail to distinguish conditions from causes. This makes them unable to understand the very opponents they like to criticize.     

Semantic factors in negation

Summary For a rather long time models conceived by linguists have been used as guiding marks for psycholinguistic research. Some aspects or parts of these models are now being criticised for not providing optimal orientation, and part of this critique is aimed at the concept of transformation. In this paper, the heuristic usefulness of conceiving negation as a transformation applied to deep structure is explored.40 Ss had to learn one positive or one of three negative versions of 8 sentences. When recall was tested, we found confusions between the negative versions, but not between the negative and the positive versions of a sentence. Moreover, the different negative versions of any one sentence are reproduced with different frequencies. These results are interpreted (a) by relating it to the concept of scope of negation, (b) by introducing the concept of semantic implication.

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Zusammenfassung In der Beziehung zwischen Linguistik und Psycholinguistik hat lange Zeit die Linguistik die führende Rolle gespielt: sie hat als Compentence-Modelle jene sprachlichen Strukturen formuliert, deren Spuren die Psycholinguistik im Bereich der Performance nachzuzeichnen suchte. Ein Teil der Kritik, die sich in jüngster Zeit gegen diese Vorgehensweise richtet, konzentriert sich auf den Begriff der Transformation. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird untersucht, ob es psychologisch sinnvoll ist, die Negation als Transformation zu behandeln.40 Vpn erhalten in einem Gedächtnisexperiment neben der positiven drei verschiedene negative Versionen von Sätzen dargeboten. Die Reproduktionsleistungen lassen erkennen, daß wohl Verwechslungen der verschiedenen negativen Versionen eines Satzes vorkommen, nicht aber Verwechslungen zwischen negativen und der positiven Version.Darüber hinaus zeigt sich, daß die verschiedenen negativen Versionen verschieden häufig reproduziert werden. Zur Erklärung dieses Befundes werden zwei Interpretationen angeboten: 1. der verschiedene Bereich der Negation stellt eine verschieden große Speicherbelastung dar; 2. der Grad der semantischen Implikation der Wörter eines Satzes steht in umgekehrtem Verhältnis zum Aufwand, die Negation zusätzlich zu speichern.

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Am Zustandekommen dieser Untersuchung und an der Diskussion der Ergebnisse waren die folgenden Damen und Herren beteiligt: Frau Bosshardt, Frl. Fischer, Frau Kramps, Frl. Dr. Mainka und die Herren Dipl.-Psychol. Bock, Bosshardt und Engelkamp. Ihnen allen habe ich herzlich zu danken.     

Anaphora and negation

Philosophical Studies - One of the central questions of discourse dynamics is when an anaphoric pronoun is licensed. This paper addresses this question as it pertains to the complex data involving...     

视觉符号否定的加工进程

本研究采用图-词匹配的判断任务探讨视觉符号否定的加工机制, 设计3个实验, 分别探讨视觉符号否定在加工早期(250 ms)、中期(750 ms)及晚期(1500 ms)的心理模拟特点。结果发现, 在视觉符号否定加工的早期、中期及晚期, 与真实状态匹配的否定相关词的反应时都显著快于与被否定状态匹配的肯定相关词。该结果表明, 与文字符号否定加工的两步模拟假设不同, 在视觉符号否定的加工中, 被试在早期就模拟了事件的真实状态, 并在中期和晚期一直保持该状态的表征, 符合一步模拟假设; 此外, 被否定信息加工的抑制/保存假设得到支持。     

Impact of negation salience and cognitive resources on negation during attitude formation

Because of the increased cognitive resources required to process negations, past research has shown that explicit attitude measures are more sensitive to negations than implicit attitude measures. The current work demonstrated that the differential impact of negations on implicit and explicit attitude measures was moderated by (a) the extent to which the negation was made salient and (b) the amount of cognitive resources available during attitude formation. When negations were less visually salient, explicit but not implicit attitude measures reflected the intended valence of the negations. When negations were more visually salient, both explicit and implicit attitude measures reflected the intended valence of the negations, but only when perceivers had ample cognitive resources during encoding. Competing models of negation processing, schema-plus-tag and fusion, were examined to determine how negation salience impacts the processing of negations.     

The phenomenology of negation

Negation is a fundamental component of communication (no-answers), cognition (logical negation), perception (different color), attitude (dislike), emotion (hatred), and volition (disagreement). Its many uses make it difficult to provide an integrated definition of the concept. The aim of this paper is to show that an integrated definition of the concept can be arrived at by means of a phenomenological method structuring it into three general essences labelled lack, otherness and obstruction.

Some aspects of negation in English

I introduce a formal language called the language of informational independence (IL-language, for short) that extends an ordinary first-order language in a natural way. This language is interpreted in terms of semantical games of imperfect information. In this language, one can define two negations: (i) strong or dual negation, and (ii) weak or contradictory negation. The latter negation, unlike the former, can occur only sentence-initially. Then I argue that, to a certain extent, the two negations match the distinction existing in natural languages between sentential and constituent negation. As a corollary, I derive the fact that there are no mechanical rules for forming the contradictory negation of an English sentence.     

A brief history of negation

The history of scholarship on negation tracks and illuminates the major developments in the history of metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, from Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle through Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein to contemporary formal theorists. Our perspective focuses on the catalytic role played by the 20th century philosopher of language Paul Grice, whose views on negation serve as a fulcrum for his attempt to bridge the (neo-)Traditionalist and Formalist traditions in logical thought. Grice's remarks on negation and speaker meaning and the elaboration of his ideas by subsequent neo-Griceans are summarized and situated within a broader picture of the role of contradictory and contrary negation in the frameworks of Aristotelians, Medievals, early modern schoolmaster-logicians, 19th and early 20th century neo-Idealists and Formalists, Oxford ordinary-language analytics, practitioners of classical and non-classical logics, and a range of other philosophers and linguists. Particular attention is paid to the relations between negation and the other operators of propositional and predicate calculus. Implications for accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language are also pursued and extensive references to related work are provided.     

Linguistic negation in autistic and normal children

Young, severely maladaptive autistic children with some speech competence were compared to normally developing 3-year-old children of lower and middle class and 5-year-olds of lower class on negation tasks. All subjects were shown 12 sets of cards depicting negative contrasts designed to elicit semantic categories of nonexistence, denial, and rejection and were tested for production, imitation, and comprehension. Syntactic and semantic analysis revealed that autistic children were superior imitators and poor producers but showed skills in comprehension comparable to a 4-year-old's level of functioning. While retarded in some functions, the experimental group produced syntactic structures that were more rigid, suggesting the significantly greater use of imitation as a major strategy in linguistic coding.This work was done at the NYU-Bellevue Medical Center with partial support by NIMH Grant No. MH 07331 to R. K.     

Boolean negation and all that

Conclusion We have seen that proofs of soundness of (Boolean) DS, EFQ and of ABS — and hence the legitimation of these inferences — can be achieved only be appealing to the very form of reasoning in question. But this by no means implies that we have to fall back on classical reasoning willy-nilly. Many logical theories can provide the relevant boot-strapping. Decision between them has, therefore, to be made on other grounds. The grounds include the many criteria familiar from the philosophy of science: theoretical integrity (e.g., paucity of ad hoc hypotheses), adequacy to the data (explaining the data of inference —all inferences, not just those chosen from consistent domains!) and so on. This paper has not attempted to address these issues in general. All it demonstrates is that the charge that a dialetheist solution to the semantic paradoxes can be maintained only by making some intelligible notion ineffable cannot be made to stick. The dialetheist has a coherent position, endorsing the T-scheme, but rejecting DS, EFQ (even Boolean DS and EFQ) and ABS. And any argument to the effect that the relevant notions are both ineffable and intelligible begs the question. The case against consistent solutions to the semantic paradoxes therefore remains intact.     

The Craig interpolation theorem for prepositional logics with strong negation

This paper deals with, prepositional calculi with strong negation (N-logics) in which the Craig interpolation theorem holds. N-logics are defined to be axiomatic strengthenings of the intuitionistic calculus enriched with a unary connective called strong negation. There exists continuum of N-logics, but the Craig interpolation theorem holds only in 14 of them.