Timeline for Is, "No," a sentence-level negation in natural language?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
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| May 20, 2023 at 18:31 | comment | added | David Gudeman | @KristianBerry, yes, in a sense it's a trivial point, or at least it's a point about syntax rather than meaning or truth. They aren't saying that you cannot negate a sentence, just that there is no specific syntactic operator of the form "not X" to negate a sentence X. In English, of course, you can't say "not I'm hungry" like you can in propositional logic. | |
| May 20, 2023 at 14:59 | comment | added | Kristian Berry | OK, so I think your answer is correct because it tracks the details more closely than my interpretation did, and so I think my interpretation must be off. Maybe, "No," does have a monadic sentence-level negation function but there's a subtle difference compared to what the SEP is talking about. Maybe not an important difference, but it's there. | |
| May 20, 2023 at 14:58 | vote | accept | Kristian Berry | ||
| May 20, 2023 at 14:55 | comment | added | Kristian Berry | But actually, I'm not sure I'm reading the SEP article correctly. I guess I would look at, "No," like in function notation, so like, "No(S)," for some S, and then I don't know how much difference there is between a monadic function operator and a one-place connective??? | |
| May 20, 2023 at 14:47 | comment | added | Kristian Berry | Isn't a one-place connective an operator that attaches to one sentence to yield a new sentence? | |
| May 20, 2023 at 14:39 | comment | added | David Gudeman | @KristianBerry, do you know what a one-place connective is? My answer assumes you do, but these responses seem to indicate otherwise. I didn't say that "no" doesn't negate a sentence; I said that it's not a one-place connective, which is exactly what the SEP quote says doesn't exist. | |
| May 20, 2023 at 14:31 | comment | added | Kristian Berry | Or if, instead of asking questions, we had someone say, "The moon is blue," and then someone says, "No," to that. This would lead to, "The moon is not blue," or a positive claim about another color. But so I still don't see how the initial, "No," fails to negate the original sentence. I mean, imagine, "The moon is blue," and then, "No, the moon is blue." Would that make sense? | |
| May 20, 2023 at 14:28 | comment | added | Kristian Berry | The SEP article on questions says that for some reason, "Most authors require answers to be sentences or propositions, so that answers to a question are the kind of thing that is true or false. Tichy (1978) is a striking exception and argues that answers can be of any logical type," incl. single words/noun-phrases. But so why would a one-word sentence, "No," fail to count as a negation of a previous possible sentence? | |
| May 20, 2023 at 14:09 | history | answered | David Gudeman | CC BY-SA 4.0 |