Negation via "not" in the brain and behavior
Two related articles about negation, courtesy of Victor Mair at Language Log:
Coopmans CW, Mai A, Martin AE (2024) “Not” in the brain and behavior. PLoS Biol 22(5): e3002656. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002656
Negation is key for cognition but has no physical basis, raising questions about its neural origins. A new study in PLOS Biology on the negation of scalar adjectives shows that negation acts in part by altering the response to the adjective it negates.
Language fundamentally abstracts from what is observable in the environment, and it does so often in ways ...