Abstract

In his Notebooks 1914--1916 Ludwig Wittgenstein refers to "the mystery of negation: This is not how things are, and yet we can say how things are not." In my thesis I explore this mystery---its historical roots, the fundamental difficulties it raises, how modern philosophers have treated these difficulties, and how such treatments might be modified to resolve the mystery more effectively. Working within the context of a referential theory of meaning and a correspondence theory of truth I examine the views of a range of the most important relevant thinkers in an attempt to determine just what sort of relation between language and the world best accounts for meaningful negative language, that is, meaningful true negative statements and meaningful false statements, with minimum ontological implications. ;Specifically, my thesis divides into three parts. In Part One I explore the ancient Greek historical roots of the issue via critical examination of Parmenides's foundational statement of the problem in his poem "On Nature" and of Plato's extended response through a series of dialogues culminating in Parmenides and Sophist. Ontologically speaking Plato's treatment of this matter can be read in two ways, and in Part Two I consider both of these readings through surprisingly close analogues found in the late 19th and early 20th-century works of F. H. Bradley and Bertrand Russell. Finally, in Part Three I spell out, critique, and eventually modify the inspired modal approach to this problem proposed by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. When a view of negation as rooted in the relation between the possible and the actual is conjoined with a suitable combinatorial theory of possibility which sees what can be as limited to rearrangements of what is, then the end result is an account of negative language dependent upon a world no more populous than that which underlies an account of true positive language. As such, properly understood, negative language need not have ontological implications.