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.