For a moment there, I thought the post would go in a different direction, i.e, that you were going to connect this phenomenon with the literature on how negation is also very difficult for (a) iconic depiction (Barwise, Abell, Aguilera, etc.), (b) mental models (Johnson and Laird, etc.) and (c) non-human cognition (J. L. Bermúdez, Jorge Morales Ladrón de Guevara, etc.). In other words, it is very hard to represent negative information but in symbolic format. However, it is usually taken for granted that most cognition is not symbolic. This seems paradoxical.
My own take on this is that negation is not a single phenomenon and that different sort of information that we may call 'negative' are cognitively processed in different ways. Some of it will be symbolic, but other will not. For example, some 'negative information' is actually architectural, i.e., it results from constraints in how information flows among modules. Thus, for example, we 'know' that today is not a place because temporal information is processed in relative isolation from spatial information. However, of course, this is not going to work for all sorts of negations.
For a moment there, I thought the post would go in a different direction, i.e, that you were going to connect this phenomenon with the literature on how negation is also very difficult for (a) iconic depiction (Barwise, Abell, Aguilera, etc.), (b) mental models (Johnson and Laird, etc.) and (c) non-human cognition (J. L. Bermúdez, Jorge Morales Ladrón de Guevara, etc.). In other words, it is very hard to represent negative information but in symbolic format. However, it is usually taken for granted that most cognition is not symbolic. This seems paradoxical.
My own take on this is that negation is not a single phenomenon and that different sort of information that we may call 'negative' are cognitively processed in different ways. Some of it will be symbolic, but other will not. For example, some 'negative information' is actually architectural, i.e., it results from constraints in how information flows among modules. Thus, for example, we 'know' that today is not a place because temporal information is processed in relative isolation from spatial information. However, of course, this is not going to work for all sorts of negations.