‘Not’ Again

This paper revisits some views about negation I defended in two early papers. Some of the themes of those papers have been developed sympathetically in recent work by Tim Smiley, Lloyd Humberstone and Ian Rumfitt. However, Rumfitt and Peter Gibbard have both criticised arguments I offered in defence of Double Negation Elimination (DNE), against a Dummettian intuitionist. I reconsider those arguments, arguing that although they survive Rumfitt’s and Gibbard’s attacks, the case against Dummett is for other reasons less straightforward than I took it to be. With reference to Rumfitt’s own defence of DNE, I call attention to the attractions of the view defended in my second paper that negation has dialectical origins. I also point out some difficulties for this view which seem to have been overlooked by previous writers, including me.