RESOLVING APPARENT CONTRADICTIONS - ADULTS AND PRESCHOOLERS ABILITY TO COPE WITH NONCLASSICAL NEGATION

If the logic of natural language negation were classical - a simple ma tter of true and false - then it would be a disaster to answer a quest ion like Is this essay good? with Yes and no. The overwhelming majorit y of adults (N = 40) asked to resolve this apparent contradiction were found to do so by appealing to the structure of the essay (e.g. Its t hesis was good but its argument was not). Three-year-olds (N = 24), wh en suitably prepared, also appealed to object structure to resolve a s imilar apparent contradiction. These results are discussed in relation to a non-classical logical model that can handle object structure.