POSITIVE/NEGATIVE Denial, Opposition, Contradiction

Abstract

Starting from an examination of the current meaning of “positive” and “negative”, the essay focuses on the impossibility of understanding the semantics of these terms through the concept of “relationship” and shows how their meaning is the same and coincides with that of absolute negation. This allows us to expose the existing conflict between the principle of non-contradiction (the expression of which is simply that of a “sense”) and the principle of the excluded third, which, on the other hand, interprets contradiction in relational terms: as a relationship of mutual exclusion between the judgments one of which is the negation of the other. The point of view expressed by the essay is that between the two principles (and between the two ways of interpreting the “positive” and the “negative”: one in terms of “sense” and the other in relational terms) there is the same distance as between truth and doxa in Parmenides' thought. A similar perspective allows us to recognize, in the ontology of the Struttura originaria, the dependence on and the derivation from the second principle rather than from the first principle.