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nus), rational and mortal (differentia), to say that something is not a man means that it is not rational and not mortal, leaving unprejudiced whether it is animal or not (the possible deletion of animal remaining a matter for further contextual clues). A different result would occur with external negation. If, according to the Aristotelian notion of definition, the definiendum is biconditionally linked with the whole set of properties representing its definition (a man being by definition a rational mortal animal), if one denies that something is a rational mortal animal, then one denies by modus tollens that something is a man, and to deny man would entail the negation of the whole definition. However, this occurs only with very artificial external negations ("it is untrue that there are men on Mars"). Unfortunately, natural languages usually put into play internal negation like that of (13). Moreover, as shown in the preceding section, an encyclopedic representation cannot have a Porphyrian tree format; therefore, the problem becomes more and more puzzling. There is no encyclopedic representation of a set of meaning postulates that can say what is specifically deleted by the negation of the corresponding term or of the sentence containing it. Every ambiguity can be solved only by further co-textual information. If the husband of the example above does not provide more information to his wife, he certainly will not succeed in reassuring her. But it is not language that must be taken as responsible for such a communicative misadventure: the husband is exaggeratedly laconic and violates the maxim of quantity. His abruptness is a matter for a marriage counselor, not for a linguist. Language (natural language) is a flexible system of signification conceived for producing texts, not for uttering sentences in "examplese." At this point we can say that there is a kind of meaning postulate which can escape these ambiguities: it is the presupposition as coded in the encyclopedic representation of p-terms. |
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Sentence (14) as well as its negative counterpart (15) equally presupposes (16): |
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(15) I did not clean the room. |
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As we have seen in the section on challenging presuppositions, any attempt to challenge this specific nature of presuppositions requires a textual strategy which either challenges the use of the p-term de dicto or "stages" a textual situation in which one represents people using deceitful p-terms. |
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