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Abstract:
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The capacity to negate is the capacity to refuse, to contradict, to lie, to speak ironically, to distinguish truth from falsity—in short, the capacity to be human. This book offers a unique synthesis of past and current work on the structure, meaning, and use of negative expressions. It draws from work in the philosophy of language and mind, in psychology, and in linguistics (from the interacting levels of morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and lexicon). As its title suggests, A Natural History of Negation is first of all a critical synopsis and reinterpretation of past work on negation, both in the West and the East. Negation is a topic which engaged Aristotle and the Buddha, Spinoza and Leibniz, Hegel and Mill, Freud and Marx, Russell and Frege. This otherwise rather disparate collection of scholars shared a recognition of the paradox posed by the contrast between the standard logical role of this most basic operator (simple truth-value reversal) and the incredible complexity of the form and function of negative sentences in natural language. The logical symmetry between affirmative and negative propositions is at odds with a striking asymmetry in language structure and language use. Much of the descriptive, theoretical, and empirical work on negation over the last 25 centuries has focused on the relatively marked, complex, or subjective nature of the negative statement. After tracking its intellectual history, Horn reexamines this asymmetry from the perspective of the neo-Gricean pragmatic framework he has developed to account for inference and language change.
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