Nots and knots
by Bob on March 4, 2007
It's actually very amazing about the modifying word of negation, "not". What's particularly interesting to me, and some psychologists and in their writings, is the nature of using "not".
One might say that Dr. Freud might have kicked it all off, with his concept of the so-called "Freudian joke" wherein what one jokes about is really serious. Or a Freduian slip of the tongue.
I have mostly found, just about without reasonable exception, that when people use the word "not" in a sentence or expressed thought, especially to another person, it usually means they have seriously thought about the "not-not" case. Like I said, almost without exception.
Take, for example, the common parlance, such as one saying, "I don't mean to insult you, but you smell of garlic". Well, it's really an insult regardless. What a cloke of deceitfulness the word "not" is in this case ! It's just like one of the famous Ciceronian oratory techniques which goes something like this in one of Cicero's speeches against Cataline: "Cataline, I will not mention all the women you have been with, nor will I mention the way you treated your wife, so I will tell you that your behaviour in this Senate ..." etc. A bit more obvious.
Usually when people use "not" they really seem to mean the non-not.
At this point we can editorially and intellectually slide into a very interesting psychiatrist and author I read way back in the 1960s when studying at university: Dr. Ronald David Laing, or R.D. Laing for short. Besides his early work which I read very carefully, such as "The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness" from 1960, a very interesting book is relevant here to our study of the use of "not". The book was called Knots and published in 1970. It is a mind-bending study in our use of language amongst other things.
Many people are very critical of Dr. Laing. But there is more there than meets the eye. One has to take a careful reading before coming to an absolute conclusion. Kind of like judging Picasso's abstract art phase.
Let's take an example from Knots. Quoting Dr. Laing ...
* * *
They are playing a game. They are playing at not
playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I
shall break the rules and they will punish me.
I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
* * *
Sounds like a logical syllogism, of course.
So there we go. Knots. The knots we all get ourselves into by betraying ourselves by using knotted "not"s.
It's good that in formal syllogistic logic we can get away with "not" seemingly very innocently. Until we read the play Rhinoceros by Ionesco and realise that with syllogistic logic we might get to formally prove that a cat has five paws, according to the play itself, albeit jokingly. Or was it a joke ?
I'll not go on any further. Oops ... Since we aren't talking about the building block constructor set and game, Lego, we're talking about the Latin, Nego. See ? Knots. It's all knots. Then we might intellectually journey to Michel Foucault someday, too. That's a trip too.