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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]
| 11210 | Standardly 'and' and 'but' are held to have the same sense by having the same truth table [Rumfitt] |
| 11211 | If a sound conclusion comes from two errors that cancel out, the path of the argument must matter [Rumfitt] |
| 11212 | The sense of a connective comes from primitively obvious rules of inference [Rumfitt] |
| 11214 | We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence [Rumfitt] |