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Full Idea
The standard view is that affirming not-A is more complex than affirming the atomic sentence A itself, with the latter determining its sense. But we could learn 'not' directly, by learning at once how to either affirm A or reject A.
Gist of Idea
We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence
Source
Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], IV)
Book Ref
-: 'Mind' [-], p.797
A Reaction
[compressed] This seems fairly anti-Fregean in spirit, because it looks at the psychology of how we learn 'not' as a way of clarifying what we mean by it, rather than just looking at its logical behaviour (and thus giving it a secondary role).
Related Idea
Idea 18903 Sommers promotes the old idea that negation basically refers to terms [Sommers, by Engelbretsen]
| 1554 | Contradiction is impossible, since only one side of the argument refers to the true facts [Prodicus, by Didymus the Blind] |
| 1705 | It doesn't have to be the case that in opposed views one is true and the other false [Aristotle] |
| 12368 | Negation takes something away from something [Aristotle] |
| 16491 | If we define 'this is not blue' as disbelief in 'this is blue', we eliminate 'not' as an ingredient of facts [Russell] |
| 12594 | If one proposition negates the other, which is the negative one? [Harman] |
| 12338 | We must either assert or deny any single predicate of any single subject [Badiou] |
| 19005 | Not-A is too strong to just erase an improper assertion, because it actually reverses A [Yablo] |
| 18906 | Negating a predicate term and denying its unnegated version are quite different [Engelbretsen] |
| 11214 | We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence [Rumfitt] |
| 18829 | The truth grounds for 'not A' are the possibilities incompatible with truth grounds for A [Rumfitt] |