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Full Idea
Natural language does not possess a sentential negation-operator.
Gist of Idea
Natural language 'not' doesn't apply to sentences
Source
Michael Dummett (Presupposition [1960], p.27)
Book Ref
Dummett,Michael: 'Truth and Other Enigmas' [Duckworth 1978], p.27
A Reaction
This is a criticism of Strawson, who criticises logic for not following natural language, but does it himself with negation. In the question of how language and logic connect, this idea seems important. Term Logic aims to get closer to natural language.
Related Idea
Idea 19053 Logic would be more natural if negation only referred to predicates [Dummett]
| 20788 | The contradictory of a contradictory is an affirmation [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 22017 | Normativity needs the possibility of negation, in affirmation and denial [Fichte, by Pinkard] |
| 21777 | Negation of negation doubles back into a self-relationship [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| 16489 | Is it possible to state every possible truth about the whole course of nature without using 'not'? [Russell] |
| 18722 | Negations are not just reversals of truth-value, since that can happen without negation [Wittgenstein on Russell] |
| 18723 | We may correctly use 'not' without making the rule explicit [Wittgenstein] |
| 23493 | 'Not' isn't an object, because not-not-p would then differ from p [Wittgenstein] |
| 23066 | Negation doesn't arise from reasoning, but from deep instincts [Cioran] |
| 18903 | Sommers promotes the old idea that negation basically refers to terms [Sommers, by Engelbretsen] |
| 18801 | Classical negation is circular, if it relies on knowing negation-conditions from truth-conditions [Dummett] |
| 19052 | Natural language 'not' doesn't apply to sentences [Dummett] |
| 18476 | 'A is F' may not be positive ('is dead'), and 'A is not-F' may not be negative ('is not blind') [MacBride] |
| 18908 | Standard logic only negates sentences, even via negated general terms or predicates [Engelbretsen] |