The revival of rejective negation

Whether assent )'acceptance') and dissent ('rejection') are thought of us s peech acts or as propositional attitudes, the leading idea of rejectivism i s that a grasp of the distinction between them is prior to our understandin g of negation as a sentence operator, this operator then being explicable a s applying to A to yield something assent to which is tantamount to dissent from A. Widely thought to have been refuted by an argument of Frege's, rej ectivism has undergone something of a revival in recent years, especially i n writings by Huw Price and Timothy Smiley. While agreeing that Frege's arg ument does not refute the position, we shall air some philosophical qualms about it in Section 5, after a thorough examination of the formal issues in Sections 1-4. This discussion draws on--and seeks to draw attention to--so me pertinent work of Kent Bendall in the 1970s.