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Two Forms of Exclusion Mean Two Different Negations
Author(s) -
Silva Marcos
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
philosophical investigations
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.172
H-Index - 14
eISSN - 1467-9205
pISSN - 0190-0536
DOI - 10.1111/phin.12068
Subject(s) - negation , ascription , contradiction , negation as failure , mathematics , context (archaeology) , law of excluded middle , denial , linguistics , computer science , philosophy , psychology , semantics (computer science) , operational semantics , stable model semantics , psychoanalysis , programming language , paleontology , biology
Here, the logical behaviour of negation in W ittgenstein's T ractatus (1918) is compared with D emos' account of denial (1917). Even if we hold negation as a pure syntactical device, at least in some context, it brings a handful of complex semantic information – potentially an infinite amount (e.g., in the ascription of degrees to empirical qualities or of colours to visual points). We advocate then the existence of at least two negations due to the existence of two different and non‐reducible types of exclusion. The first negation is a T ractarian and classical one, based on the notion of contradiction, whereas the second is a non‐classical negation, based on the notion of contrariety.