Overview

The notion of negation is one of the central logical notions. It has been studied since antiquity and has been subjected to thorough investigations in the development of philosophical logic, linguistics, artificial intelligence and logic programming. The properties of negation-in combination with those of other logical operations and structural features of the deducibility relation-serve as gateways among logical systems. Therefore negation plays an important role in selecting logical systems for particular applications. At the moment negation is a 'hot topic', and there is an urgent need for a comprehensive account of this logical key concept. We therefore have asked leading scholars in various branches of logic to contribute to a volume on "What is Negation?". The result is the present neatly focused collection of re- search papers bringing together different approaches toward a general characteri- zation of kinds of negation and classifications thereof. The volume is structured into four interrelated thematic parts. Part I is centered around the themes of Models, Relevance and Impossibility. In Chapter 1 (Negation: Two Points of View), Arnon Avron develops two characteri- zations of negation, one semantic the other proof-theoretic. Interestingly and maybe provokingly, under neither of these accounts intuitionistic negation emerges as a genuine negation. J. Michael Dunn in Chapter 2 (A Comparative Study of Various Model-theoretic Treatments of Negation: A History of Formal Negation) surveys a detailed correspondence-theoretic classifcation of various notions of negation in terms of properties of a binary relation interpreted as incompatibility.