Abstract:In this paper I argue that negation in The Port Royal Logic is not a failed or incoherent approximation of Boolean complementation as maintained by Sylvain Auroux and Marc Dominicy, but is rather a version of privative negation from medieval logic, and that as such it has a perfectly coherent semantics. The discussion reviews the critiques of Auroux and Dominicy as well as the semantics of privative negation as found in Aristotle, Proclus, Ockham, Buridan, Descartes, and Arnauld.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.