Negating Rules

The paper is intended as a first, tentative, contribution to the clarification of the place that negation has in prescriptive discourse. In particular, the paper analyzes the ways in which rules may be said to be negated and the meanings they assume when they are so regarded. In so doing, the differences between external and internal negation of conditional rules are examined. The paper also deals with the effects of inconsistency between conditional rules, understood as the conjunction of a conditional rule and its corresponding conditional denial. The main result of the paper is that both rules negation and rules inconsistency are unclear concepts, casting their shadows over the very concept of rule.