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over, a given text can act as a reduction or an enlargement of the kj's of both S and A. Now, when in a textual intercourse S says that something is not chlorine (internal negation), it is rather difficult to decide whether S means that this something is not greenish, or that it does not have the atomic number 17, or that it is not the compound, discovered by Scheele in 1774. In order to understand what S is deleting, further contextual clues are required, as well as hints about the situation of utterance (is it a discussion between physicists or between laymen?). |
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Let us take a more familiar example. Let us suppose that an encyclopedic representation of man should encompass more or less organized common knowledge (animal, human, adult, male), biological and physiological information, old traditional definitions (mortal rational animal, featherless two-legged mammal), information about the average size, weight, and height of men, historical elements (let us say, men are the animals of which Darwin said that p), grammatical instructions about the possibility of using the expression man in certain contexts to indicate both male and female humans, and so on, potentiatly ad infinitum. In an ideal situation of utterance (the case of the anonymous letter described in Katz 1977), the expression man, taken out of context and out of any circumstance of utterance, can mean all K, or at least all the kj, at the disposal of the possible A of the utterance. Let us suppose on the contrary that at 8:00 pm, from the living room of her house in New Jersey, a wife utters (12) to her husband: |
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(12) Honey, there is a man on the lawn near the fence! |
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Probably S does not suggest to A that there is on the lawn a representative of the kind of animals studied by Darwin, nor that there is a rational and mortal being; she says that there is a male human adult. Now suppose that the husband answers (13): |
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(13) No, honey, it's not a man. . . . |
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It is absolutely unclear what the husband is denying and what survives his negation: the "thing" on the lawn can be a boy, a boa constrictor, a tree, an alien invader, the shadow projected by the light in the street upon an oak. . . . |
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If our encyclopedic knowledge were as strictly organized as a Porphyrian tree, by means of genus and differentia specifica, one could say that by internal negation the differentia specifica is deleted, while the survival of the genus remains undetermined. Since a man is an animal (ge- |
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