{"id":21618,"date":"2015-10-11T06:44:47","date_gmt":"2015-10-11T11:44:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=21618"},"modified":"2015-10-11T07:27:07","modified_gmt":"2015-10-11T12:27:07","slug":"denying-that-the-earth-is-not-flat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=21618","title":{"rendered":"Denying that the earth is not flat"},"content":{"rendered":"

M.S. wrote to contribute an item for our misnegation collection<\/a>\u00a0— Liel Leibovitz, \"\u2018The New York Times\u2019 Goes Truther on the Temple Mount<\/a>\", Tablet<\/em> 10\/9\/2015 [emphasis added]<\/em>:<\/p>\n

And so, because the paper of record won\u2019t put it clearly, permit me the pleasure: Denying that a Jewish temple stood on the Temple Mount is not a form of historical argument. It is akin to denying that the earth is not flat.<\/strong> Or denying that global warming is real. Or that the evidence of human evolution is widely accepted by scholars.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But this example illustrates how hard — even unnatural — it is to process phrases with multiple negations, because in fact the example is semantically correct.<\/p>\n

The author is giving a list of what he takes to be self-evident truths, where the typical journalistic \"on one hand but on the other hand\" treatment is inappropriate: Global Warming is real; the evidence of human evolution is widely accepted by scholars; the earth is not flat; a Jewish temple stood on the Temple Mount. Denying any of these is \"not a form of historical argument\".<\/p>\n

However, all of these example are positive statements except for \"the earth is not flat\". And adding the lexical negation of matrix-clause \"denying that __\"<\/em>, and wrapping the whole thing in \"It is akin to __<\/em>\", stretches our poor monkey brains near to (or beyond) the breaking point. At least, speaking for myself, it took me a second reading, and a bit of scrutiny, to decide that the passage is really OK.<\/p>\n

This reminds me of the work of Bela Julesz<\/a> on visual texture perception — thus the abstract from \"Textons, the elements of texture perception, and their interactions<\/a>\", Nature<\/em> 1981:<\/p>\n

Research with texture pairs having identical second-order statistics has revealed that the pre-attentive texture discrimination system cannot globally process third- and higher-order statistics, and that discrimination is the result of a few local conspicuous features, called textons. It seems that only the first-order statistics of these textons have perceptual significance, and the relative phase between textons cannot be perceived without detailed scrutiny by focal attention.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some examples from that paper of textures that can be discriminated by pre-attentive vision:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And in contrast, some that cannot be discriminated with \"focal attention\":<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It seems to me that there's an analogous issue with semantic processing — there are some things that we can understand through\u00a0the linguistic equivalent of \"pre-attentive vision\", and other things we can only work out by engaging in the linguistic equivalent of \"focal scrutiny\".<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

M.S. wrote to contribute an item for our misnegation collection\u00a0— Liel Leibovitz, \"\u2018The New York Times\u2019 Goes Truther on the Temple Mount\", Tablet 10\/9\/2015 [emphasis added]: And so, because the paper of record won\u2019t put it clearly, permit me the pleasure: Denying that a Jewish temple stood on the Temple Mount is not a form […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology-of-language","category-semantics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21618"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21623,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21618\/revisions\/21623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}