Concept Negation in Kant

Kant distinguishes concept negation from copula negation. While the latter results in a negative judgement, i.e. a judgement denying a property of certain objects, the former gives rise to a negative concept, such as ‘immortal’. Since Kant’s remarks on concept negation are scattered and inconclusive, five interpretations are worked out and put to the test: logical negation, pseudo-negation, attribution of a zero degree, possibility-restricted negation and genus-restricted negation. Whereas the first four interpretations fail for a number of reasons, genus-restricted negation turns out to be tenable.

Ramón Gaya: "Creo que soy poeta pintando"

Simónides de Ceos, que definió la poesía una pintura que habla y la pintura una poesía muda, contribuyó al origen de la filosofía del arte, base de la moderna estética occidental. Para el filósofo italiano Benedetto Croce el arte es la síntesis estética de la intuición y la expresión a través del lenguaje lírico. Encarna las representaciones de la belleza, un evento universal, ajeno a la Historia y a la crítica de arte. De manera más radical, Ramón Gaya rechazó este mismo saber de una manera más radical desde que era un jovencísimo pintor, decepcionado por las vanguardias. Su planteamiento de la obra de arte se aproxima a una actitud mística. Emerge cuando se enfrenta a la pintura de Velázquez en España, antes de exiliarse en México. Este sentimiento trascendente se agudiza cuando visita Venecia por primera vez, en 1952, y asocia la pintura con el agua que fluye. Es el primer paso de su identificación sagrada de las artes –pintura, poesía, escultura y música– con la Naturaleza y sus elementos cosmológicos. La experiencia veneciana posibilita una nueva creatividad icónica y verbal. La pintura conlleva siempre una enigmática dualidad, manteniendo rasgos de su procedencia misteriosa. Los poemas que Ramón Gaya le dedica al Crepúsculo de Miguel Ángel son una muestra de su intermedialidad heterodoxa, donde a la técnica de lo diáfano en pintura corresponde el uso de la negación lógica por escrito. Esta estrategia lingüística es afín a la de los ensayos que tratan del mismo tema. Simonides of Ceos, who defined poetry as a speaking picture and painting a mute poetry, contributed to the rise of philosophy of art, the basis of modern Western aesthetics. For the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce art is the aesthetic synthesis of intuition and expression through lyrical language. It embodies the representations of beauty, a universal event that doesn’t concern History nor art criticism. In a more radical way, Ramón Gaya refused this same knowledge since he was a very young painter, disappointed by avant-garde. His approach to works of art is close to a mystic attitude. It emerges when he faces Velázquez’s painting in Spain, before going into exile in Mexico. His transcendental feeling increases when he visits Venice for the first time, in 1952, and he associates painting with water flow. It is the first step of a sacred identification of arts –painting, poetry, sculpture and music– with nature and its cosmological elements. The Venetian experience gives birth to a new iconic and verbal creativity. Painting always involves an enigmatic duality, keeping features of its mysterious source. The poems that Ramón Gaya dedicated to Michelangelo's Dusk are a specimen of his unconventional intertermediality, where the diaphanous technique in painting corresponds to the use of logical negation in the verbal language. This linguistic strategy is in line with the essays dealing on the same topic.

The Principle of Excluded Middle in Kant

The principle of excluded middle is more important than is commonly believed for understanding Kant's overall philosophical project. In the article, this principle is examined in the following contexts: (i) kinds of judgments, (ii) concepts of opposition, negation, and determination, and (iii) apagogic proof. It is first explained how the principle of excluded middle is employed by Kant in distinguishing between the kinds of judgment. Also called the principle of division, it is the principle of disjunctive and apodictic judgments in Kant's famous table of judgments. Next, the Author shows which kind of opposition is related to the principle of the excluded middle. As a merely logical criterion of truth, this principle grounds the logical necessity of a cognition and plays an important role in the use of apagogical proofs. Then Kant's account of logical negation will be investigated briefly. Negative judgment with a negative copula indicates that something is not contained within the sphere of a given concept. This process occurs in accordance with the principle of excluded middle. Finally, an analysis is made of how Kant presents the metaphysical principle of thoroughgoing determination and its differences from the logical principle of excluded middle.

Logical negation mapped onto the brain

High-level cognitive capacities that serve communication, reasoning, and calculation are essential for finding our way in the world. But whether and to what extent these complex behaviors share the same neuronal substrate are still unresolved questions. The present study separated the aspects of logic from language and numerosity—mental faculties whose distinctness has been debated for centuries—and identified a new cytoarchitectonic area as correlate for an operation involving logical negation. A novel experimental paradigm that was implemented here in an RT/fMRI study showed a single cluster of activity that pertains to logical negation. It was distinct from clusters that were activated by numerical comparison and from the traditional language regions. The localization of this cluster was described by a newly identified cytoarchitectonic area in the left anterior insula, ventro-medial to Broca’s region. We provide evidence for the congruence between the histologically and functionally defined regions on multiple measures. Its position in the left anterior insula suggests that it functions as a mediator between language and reasoning areas.

There is no Logical Negation: True, False, Both, and Neither

In this paper I advance and defend a very simple position according to which logic is subclassical but is weaker than the leading subclassical-logic views have it.

There Is No Logical Negation Here, But There Are Alternatives: Modeling Conversational Negation with Distributional Semantics

Logical negation is a challenge for distributional semantics, because predicates and their negations tend to occur in very similar contexts, and consequently their distributional vectors are very similar. Indeed, it is not even clear what properties a “negated” distributional vector should possess. However, when linguistic negation is considered in its actual discourse usage, it often performs a role that is quite different from straightforward logical negation. If someone states, in the middle of a conversation, that “This is not a dog,” the negation strongly suggests a restricted set of alternative predicates that might hold true of the object being talked about. In particular, other canids and middle-sized mammals are plausible alternatives, birds are less likely, skyscrapers and other large buildings virtually impossible. Conversational negation acts like a graded similarity function, of the sort that distributional semantics might be good at capturing. In this article, we introduce a large data set of alternative plausibility ratings for conversationally negated nominal predicates, and we show that simple similarity in distributional semantic space provides an excellent fit to subject data. On the one hand, this fills a gap in the literature on conversational negation, proposing distributional semantics as the right tool to make explicit predictions about potential alternatives of negated predicates. On the other hand, the results suggest that negation, when addressed from a broader pragmatic perspective, far from being a nuisance, is an ideal application domain for distributional semantic methods.

Focus particles, secondary meanings, and Lexical Resource Semantics: The case of Japanese shika

Japanese has two exclusive particles ˋshika' and ˋdake'. Although traditionally, both particles were considered to be exclusive particles like ˋonly', a recent proposal claims that ˋshika' is an exceptive particle like ˋeveryone except' to account for the necessary co-occurrence of the negative suffix ˋna' and ˋshika'. We show that this negative suffix lacks two critical semantic properties of ordinary logical negation: It is not downward entailing, nor does it license negative polarity items. We show that both ˋshika' and ˋdake' are exclusive particles, but that ˋshika' encodes an additional secondary meaning. The negative suffix only contributes to the sentence's secondary meaning when it co-occurs with ˋshika'. We present an HPSG and LRS analysis that models the co-occurrence of ˋshika' and the negative suffix ˋna', and their contribution to the sentence's secondary meaning.