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ARTHUR MERINNEGATIVE ATTRIBUTES, PARTITIONS, AND RATIONAL
DECISIONS: WHY NOT SPEAK NOTSPEAK(Received 26 March 1997)1. THE ARGUMENTWhy should natural languages form negative predicates, and why
should they do so by means of morphemes interpretable as boolean
complementation? To get closer to an answer one may ask, as many
have done: What are language-independently negative attributes?I assume with Carnap (1971) that positive attributes should be
defined as elements of partitions of an attribute space. In motivation
I propose a decision-theoretic, i.e. pragmatic rationale for attribute
spaces to be partitions.Negative attributes are defined kinetically1 in terms of coarsening
a partition: that is, in terms of structure-preserving repartitioning.
This makes negative attributes indeed attributes pure and simple
purely epistemic though, in principle, syntax-independent notions;
in much the way Ramsey (1925) viewed the distinction between
particulars and universals.A result by Johnson (1986) on epistemic dynamics, drawing on
earlier work of Hoosain, Prednault, Zucker, Muresan and Glymour,
provides unobvious motivation for attribute partitions of cardinality2. These are just those which result from repartitioning by formation of negative attributes, and which negative predicate formation
is a means of communicating. I add considerations on relations to
discourse-based rationales for negation and on relations to a pragmatic reconstruction of semantics.Philosophical Studies 94: 253271, 1999.
c[#0D] 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.254 ARTHUR MERIN2. WHY INDEED NOT?All human languages appear to have expressions one might translate by English not. Why should this be so? A popular answer
begins by noting that discourse is not least a means for influencing
others deontic or epistemic commitments, including assumptions
about those of the speaker. Granted this function, a negation-free
language would make life difficult.Kant (1787: B737) famously noted that the function of negation is
to reject a putative misconception. Price (1990: 228) sharpens Kants
remark into an argument against the viability of a negation-free
language. He does so by introducing a desideratum: incompatibility
with a preceding utterance should be unmistakeably expressible.
Price takes the notion of incompatibility to be primitive and observes
that :P will be the join (disjunction, union) of all predicates Qincompatible with P.Let predicate refer to a linguistic expression S and attribute
to a denotatum jSj in your favourite set-theoretic semantics. (I treat
attribute as a synonym of property.) Then :P will...