ABSTRACT

Contrary to the contemporary view that negation is a logical operation that modifies the mere content of a thought or judgment, but not the act of thinking or judging it, Kant maintains that negation is an act of logical apperception through which I exclude a thought or judgment from what ‘I think.’ In this paper, I argue against two interpretations of Kant’s account of logical negation. According to the first, negation is a subjective psychological act of excluding an erroneous judgment. Against this, I will show that for Kant, negation is an operation of logical, not empirical apperception. The second interpretation views logical negation as an objective representation either of a relation of opposition or of non-being. I argue that, on the contrary, the logical function of negation is merely formal, not material, and therefore does not have semantic content. The paper’s final section develops a positive conception of logical negation as a formal function of judging.

摘要

与当代的观点相反，否定是一种逻辑操作，它只修改思想或判断的内容，而不是思考或判断它的行为，康德坚持认为否定是一种逻辑统觉行为，我通过它排除思想或判断来自“我认为”。在本文中，我反对康德对逻辑否定的解释的两种解释。第一，否定是排除错误判断的主观心理行为。与此相反，我将表明，对于康德来说，否定是一种逻辑操作，而不是经验统觉操作。第二种解释将逻辑否定视为对立关系或非存在关系的客观表征。我认为，相反，否定的逻辑功能只是形式上的，而不是物质上的，因此没有语义内容。论文的最后一部分发展了逻辑否定的积极概念，作为判断的正式功能。