Acceptance and rejection as opposite speech acts in logic
Acceptance & Rejection
Logic in Computer Science
Summary
The paper explains how saying 'yes' or 'no' to a statement are opposite ways to respond to an idea. It shows that accepting a statement is linked to rejecting its opposite, and rejecting a statement is linked to accepting its opposite. The authors also explain the difference between rejecting a statement and simply negating it. This helps clarify how our language expresses agreement and disagreement in a logical way.
What this means in practice
- •For natural language processing teams: Improve algorithms that detect agreement or disagreement in text by modeling acceptance and rejection as opposite but linked actions.
- •For legal tech developers: Develop tools that better represent and analyze affirmative and negative positions in legal arguments using the distinction between rejection and negation.
A position paper. It proposes an approach and reports no results.
Authors
Khashayar Irani
Abstract
In this paper, we argue that acceptance and rejection are classical speech acts that express two opposite polar positions toward propositional content and can be systematically represented within a classically outlined bilateral formal model. Acceptance occupies the positive pole, represented by positive A, whereas rejection occupies the negative pole, represented by minus A. Their classical relationship is mediated by negation because acceptance of A corresponds to rejection of negation A, while rejection of A corresponds to acceptance of negation A, represented by positive A iff minus negation A and minus A iff positive negation A. Coherency and incoherency are introduced as supplementary notions to clarify this relationship and its connection with reflexivity. A further result of the manuscript is the methodical distinction between rejection and negation namely, rejection expresses negative polarity toward A, whereas negation operates upon propositional content.