us the tools to do so, by saying that there are in fact two ways to negate a proposition. In addition to saying “A giraffe is not in the kitchen cooking dinner,” I could say “It is not the case that a giraffe is in the kitchen cooking dinner.” In the latter case, I am not implying that there is a giraffe who might be getting dinner ready if she weren’t so lazy. Abelard calls the first kind of negation “separative,” because it just denies that a predicate is connected to a subject. The second kind is called “destructive,” because what is being denied is the whole proposition rather than the
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