Does understanding negation entail affirmation?

Hasson, Uri; Glucksberg, Sam

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2005.12.005

Cited by 198 publications

(136 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…These results confirmed our hypothesis that the RTs for all modified antonyms were longer than for the bare antonyms, but at the same time they indicated that the negator is more complex to process than ganska. These tendencies for response times were also confirmed by Kaup and Zwaan (2003), MacDonald and Just (1989), Giora et al (2005a), Hasson and Glucksberg (2006) and Kaup et al (2006).…”

Section: Unbounded and Bounded Antonyms With Degree Modifierssupporting

confidence: 56%

“…From the point of view of function, Giora (2006) claims that suppression and retention are pragmatically motivated on all occasions rather than being automatic mechanisms. Hasson and Glucksberg (2006) and Kaup et al (2006) assume a juxtapositon of the negated state of affairs with the representation of the described situation which suggests that both construals are needed for our understanding of negated meanings.…”

Section: The Suppression Versus the Retention Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Antonymy and negation—The boundedness hypothesis

Paradis

Willners

2006

Journal of Pragmatics

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This paper investigates the interpretation of unbounded (scalar) adjective antonyms with and without negation such as (not) narrow -(not) wide and bounded adjective antonyms with and without negation such as (not) dead -(not) alive as well as their interpretations with approximating degree modifiers, fairly and almost, respectively. The investigation was designed to test the boundedness hypothesis, namely that the negator is sensitive to the configuration of the adjective in terms of BOUNDEDNESS. The data are Swedish and the results of the experiments show that negated unbounded adjectives do not evoke the interpretation of their antonyms, i.e. not wide does not equal 'narrow'. The results of the experiments with bounded adjectives with and without negation showed that some of the negated adjectives were interpreted as synonyms of their antonyms, i.e. not alive equals 'dead'. However, this pattern was not consistent across the bounded adjectives, since a number of them readily lent themselves to partial readings. Four types of bounded antonyms emerged from the participants' judgements. For both unbounded and bounded adjectives, the interpretations of the approximating degree modifiers and the adjectives were not significantly different from the negated adjectives. #

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Section: Unbounded and Bounded Antonyms With Degree Modifierssupporting

confidence: 56%

Section: The Suppression Versus the Retention Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Antonymy and negation—The boundedness hypothesis

Paradis

Willners

2006

Journal of Pragmatics

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“…Most research has compared affirmative and negative sentences in isolation (Hasson & Glucksberg, 2006;Just & Carpenter, 1971;Kaup et al, 2006;McDonald & Just, 1989;Wason, 1961), or following a supportive context (e.g. Giora, Fein, Aschkenazi & Alkabets-Zlozover, 2007;Glenberg, Robertson, Jansen & Johnson-Glenberg, 1999;Wason, 1965) and as such cannot address the issue of how a negated concept is reflected on-line in later processing of relevant information.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye-movements and ERPs reveal the time course of processing negation and remitting counterfactual worlds

2008

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The ability to update our current knowledge using contextual information is a vital process during every-day language comprehension. To understand a negated statement, readers are required to cancel real-world expectations, but are not explicitly provided with an alternative model. Thus, the question of how and when a negative context influences interpretation of later events arises. We report one eye-movement study (Exp.1) and one ERP study (Exp. 2) investigating the effects of negation on discourse processing. Prior context depicted a real-world (RW), or negated-world (NW), while a second sentence was manipulated to create RW anomalous continuations, where events included a violation of RW knowledge, and RW congruent continuations, where the events described were congruent with RW knowledge. Results from Experiment 1 showed that the negated discourse context did not influence initial processing of the target sentence, as reflected in participants' eye movement behaviour. Similarly, Experiment 2 revealed that the typical N400 effect to semantic violations has not been reversed by introducing a negated-world context. However, in later processing, Experiment 1 demonstrated that the negated-world context is eventually incorporated into the representation of the sentence meaning. Thus, we suggest that discourse does not always have an immediate effect on language comprehension and discuss the results in terms of a variety of accounts of representing negation. Section: Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience

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“…Voluminous behavioral research shows that it is more complicated and effortful to represent negation than affirmation (Evans, Newstead, & Byrne, 1993;Gough, 1966;Hasson & Glucksberg, 2006;Kaup, 2001;MacDonald & Just, 2002;Slobin, 1966;Stupple & Waterhouse, 2009;Wason, 1965;Watson, 1961), and recent work in cognitive neuroscience has begun uncovering the neural signatures of this difference (Christensen, 2009;Kumar, Padakannaya, Mishra, & Khetrapal, 2013). Accordingly, one might expect knowledge ascriptions for positive claims to be higher in general, whether the source of belief is inference or perception, because "any variable that increases experienced ease of processing is also likely to increase judgments of truth" (Reber & Schwarz, 1999: 342).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Skeptical Appeal: The Source‐Content Bias

Turri

2014

Cognitive Science

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Radical skepticism is the view that we know nothing or at least next to nothing. Nearly no one actually believes that skepticism is true. Yet it has remained a serious topic of discussion for millennia and it looms large in popular culture. What explains its persistent and widespread appeal? How does the skeptic get us to doubt what we ordinarily take ourselves to know? I present evidence from two experiments that classic skeptical arguments gain potency from an interaction between two factors. First, people evaluate inferential belief more harshly than perceptual belief. Second, people evaluate inferential belief more harshly when its content is negative (i.e., that something is not the case) than when it is positive (i.e., that something is the case). It just so happens that potent skeptical arguments tend to focus our attention on negative inferential beliefs, and we are especially prone to doubt that such beliefs count as knowledge. That is, our cognitive evaluations are biased against this specific combination of source and content. The skeptic sows seeds of doubt by exploiting this feature of our psychology.

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Does understanding negation entail affirmation?

Cited by 198 publications

References 28 publications

Antonymy and negation—The boundedness hypothesis

Antonymy and negation—The boundedness hypothesis

Eye-movements and ERPs reveal the time course of processing negation and remitting counterfactual worlds

Skeptical Appeal: The Source‐Content Bias

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