Affirmation-Negation: New Perspective

Anahit Hovhannisyan, Asganush Mnatsyan 
(English Department, Gyumri State Pedagogical Institute, Gyumri, Armenia)

Abstract: The general aim of the present paper is to eliminate negation entirely from logic and display a new mapping of affirmative-negative pattern. Here we examine negation in the purported presuppositional symmetry and asymmetry and reveal the polemic warefare between symmetricalists and asymmetricalists in the history of negation.

It should be noted that the principle of one-to-one correspondence can only apply to propositions, not to sentences. So, formal logic is entirely flawed or at least totally inadequate to describe the behavior of natural language. Some affirmative sentences have no directly corresponding negation, while some negative sentences lack any affirmative counterpart.

In symmetrical concept affirmation and negation are defined as units of the same level, while in asymmetrical doctrine they belong to different levels. Affirmation and negation function as two poles that are distantly located from each other and there can’t be made a bridge between them. Even in dictionaries we find the following definitions of “pole”: one of the two things that are completely opposite (Macmillan English Dictionary For Advanced Learners, 2002), either of two opposed or differentiated forces, parts or principles (Webster’s New World Dictionary, 1988).

Then we come to the conclusion that affirmation and negation are two sides of the same coin. Though they are opposed to each other but negation, being a logico-grammatical category, presupposes affirmation and affirmation presupposes negation. Negation and statement are logically equivalent but communicatively uninterchangeable.

Key words: affirmative-negative pattern, presuppositional symmetry and asymmetry, conception of negation