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Notes
“Negation,”Journal of Philosophy, 49 (No. 26):797–815.
“Eulb” is here the complementary of “blue” not in the sense that blue and yellow are complementary colors; rather, to use W. E. Johnson's terminology, the determinate blue and eulb are complementaries in that they together exhaust the range of the de-terminable, color.
“Ayer's Analysis of Negation,”Philosophical Studies, 4 (No. 4):49–55. See too his “Negative Things,”Journal of Philosophy, 49(No. 13):433-49, in which he makes a cogent case for the existence of “negative facts.” These two articles cite many of the sources, and diverse attempts, that deal with this problem.
This is essentially the argument made by Wilfrid Sellars in his “On the Logic of Complex Particulars,”Mind, n.s., 58(No. 231) :306-38. See especially pp. 316-19. Though his treatment of “negative facts” is incidental to the development of the nature of basic particulars, it is especially interesting in that it denies an Ayer-type incompati-bility view, replacing it by an account in terms of “otherness.” An examination of this view is impossible within the limits of this paper.
See Sellars,op. cit., p. 318.
Ayer,op. cit., p. 802.
Ibid., p. 803.
Ibid., p. 813.
Ibid., p. 814.
Ibid., p. 815, “… it accounts for the belief that negative statements are somehow less directly related to fact than affirmative statements are. They are less directly related to fact just in so far as they are less specific.” Again, “… we can account for the inclination that many people have towards saying that reality is positive. The explanation is that any information which is provided by a less specific statement will always be included in the information provided by some more specific statement.”
Op. cit., pp. 52–53.
Op. cit., p. 815. “Neither, as has often been remarked, are negative statements, when characterized in this way, reducible to affirmatives.” The trouble here is, though, that the negative, in Ayer's jargon, which cannot be reduced is the less specificundenied statement; it is not the denial to which it is equivalent.
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Clark, R. More on negation. Philos Stud 4, 81–87 (1953). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02309583
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02309583