I generally don't split infinitives in English. There's one case that I'm stuck on, though, because I'm not sure if there's another way to indicate the difference I have in mind: "not to do X" versus "to not do X." The former implies that X is not done, but possibly through inattention or accident; the latter, a usage borrowed mostly from the speech habits of computer scientists, implies that the not doing of X is a primary objective of one's actions.
Is there a more correct way to say this? It feels clunky every time I say it.
(What brought this to mind was a news article about the Clintons' married life, where they say that Mr. Clinton "has told friends that his No. 1 priority is not to cause her any trouble." When I read that, it seemed that "not" was modifying "is" rather than "cause," which would suggest that his next line ought to be "It's to make sure other people do! Wahahahaha!")
This has been on my mind lately
May 24 2006, 03:04:19 UTC 9 years ago
The semantics of negation are very subtle. To give some sense of how obnoxious it is: the text for my intro to semantics class has exactly one paragraph on negation. Somehow they turn propositional logic's ¬ (or !,/,...), into a whole paragraph. Because that's all they cover. Assuming that natural language is as clear-cut as propositional logic is hah-hah funny.
More specifically, what is the difference between a theist, not a theist, an atheist, and an anti-theist? The latter are both "negations" of the former, but one is a binary opposition and the other a polar opposition. We can explain them, but try to squeeze them into a truth table or two. It just doesn't feel right. There's something missing there.
I'm fairly convinced that boolean logic is impotent once you step out of the happy land of contrived boolean problems (which includes a lot of really damned useful stuff). The lay of the land here evokes program verification, and specifically, the standard quip about program verification:
Re: This has been on my mind lately
May 24 2006, 04:19:04 UTC 9 years ago
theist -> "believer in the existence of a god"
not a theist -> "not a (theist)"
atheist -> "believer in the nonexistence of a god"
anti-theist -> "opponent of (theist)s"
leaves us in much better shape. Parse enough and you're left with syntactic particles of definite Boolean meaning plus nouns and verbs with (hopefully) either irreducible definitions or agreed-upon ones. ("God" being one of the infamously bad cases; so many of the arguments for the existence thereof fall apart completely when you expand the definition of that noun)