When 2 Negatives Don’t Make a Positive

Those of us who learned about double negatives in grammar class understood them as grammatical no-nos. You were not to say, “I don’t have no bananas,” because, by denying the absence of bananas, you were confirming their presence rather than (as you presumably intended) confirming their absence.

The issue of double negation has arisen in recent decades because African American Vernacular English uses double negatives frequently. Other languages, as many have observed, regularly employ what would translate literally as double negatives. For instance, the standard French sentence Je n’en sais rien literally translates as “I don’t of it know nothing.” We all understand Mick Jagger when he croons, “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

Another type of double negation is useful rhetorically, as when Barack Obama said of the window for resolving Iran’s nuclear issues, “that time is not unlimited.” This very example suggests another truth found mostly in discussions of logic. When a double negation involves a so-called contrary, rather than a contradictory, we cannot annihilate both the “nots” and come up with a positive statement. To wit: If I write, “No apples are not red,” then we can cross out both nots to conclude that apples are red, because, as the logician Alex Scott writes, “The statement that ‘apples are not red’ is contradictory to the statement that ‘apples are red,’ because both cannot simultaneously be true and both cannot simultaneously be false.” But if I write, “She is not unhappy” or “I wouldn’t say he’s not angry,” we cannot form a conclusive statement by removing the negatives. We cannot conclude, that is, that she is happy or he is angry, because one might be neither happy nor unhappy, neither angry nor devoid of anger.

In his statement about the Iranian nuclear threat, Obama is making rhetorical use of this logical nicety. While it’s surely true that time cannot be both limited and unlimited, it’s possible also that time is neither limited nor unlimited, because no one has set limits yet. The statement works as an implied threat that’s not yet showing its teeth.

OK, we all know where this is going. Last week, after his infamous meeting with Vladimir Putin, the President of the United States was asked about Russia’s involvement in election interference in 2016. He responded, “My people came to me. They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Two days later, he tried to walk back that statement, saying, “The sentence should have been ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’ Sort of a double negative.”

Pundits have seized on this denial. Most have pointed out the absurdity of shoehorning the “corrected” statement into a larger context that clearly meant to disparage claims of Russian interference. The Economist speculated on the possibility of Trump’s engaging in so-called misnegation, a tendency to misspeak because of the number of negatives in a sentence. Referring us to Mark Liberman at Language Log, they point to former CIA chief Michael Hayden’s confusing statement, “I would not be surprised if this were not the last indictment we see that doesn’t mention an American.” Clearly, with Trump’s original sentence containing exactly one not (as opposed to Hayden’s three), misnegation is an unlikely explanation.

But I’d like to point something else out. Let us suppose, absurd as it seems, that Trump meant to say, “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” Can we flip this sentence, as we can with the red-apples sentence, to read, “I see a reason why it would be Russia”? I don’t think we can. I don’t see any reason is itself equivocal; it’s not at all the same as claiming there are no reasons. Trying to resolve the sentence by eliminating the negatives is no more possible than it is to claim that She is not unhappy means that she is happy.

Why does this matter? Because neither the sentence Trump actually said — I don’t see any reason why it would be – nor the sentence he claims to have intended — I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be — confirms the findings of American intelligence agencies: that robust evidence points to Russia’s interference in our election. Say you are indicted for murdering your wife. A video you claim to be fake shows you stabbing her multiple times with a kitchen knife. In the courtroom, you say, “I loved her. I don’t see any reason why I would be the killer.” When someone points out the existence of the video, you say, “Sorry, I misspoke. I meant to say, ‘I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t be the killer.’”

Have you confessed? Well, not quite yet. Give the investigation time.