Abstract

This discussion explores the possibility of distinguishing a tighter notion of contrariety evident in the Square of Opposition, especially in its modal incarnations, than as that binary relation holding statements that cannot both be true, with or without the added rider ‘though can both be false’. More than one theorist has voiced the intuition that the paradigmatic contraries of the traditional Square are related in some such tighter way—involving the specific role played by negation in contrasting them—that distinguishes them from other pairs of incompatible statements constructed from the same conceptual materials. Prominent among examples, these other nonstandard pairs are the ‘new contraries’ presented by Robert Blanché’s hexagon(s) of opposition. With special, though not exclusive, attention to these cases, we investigate whether contrariety in the distinguished sense can be captured by adding to the incompatibility condition the further demand that the pair of statements concerned can be represented as the results of applying some sentence operator to the content in its scope, for one of the pair, and, for the other, the application of that same operator to the negation of that content. For one of the two cases, a Blanché case, of nonstandard contrariety singled out for attention, the question of whether such a representation is available is settled at the end of Section 4, and then in a more satisfying way in Section 5, though for the other case, noticed by Peter Simons, the question remains open, after some tentative discussion in one subsection, 6.2, of an Appendix (Section 6).