From PhilPapers forum Philosophy of Language:

2009-04-24
Truth and abstraction
Reply to Stevan Harnad
Ok, thank you for your illuminating comments. I don't think, though, that they contravene my observations. After all, the emergence of affirmation and negation through heuristics related to reward and/or punishment, isn't in contradiction, or even in contrast, with what is the essence of my observations, namely the fact that negation -this is what we are interested in here- comes through symbolic representations, describing something which is not primarily out there, that is, absence. This seems so, at least when preceding 'existential' predicates , but not in all cases of its use. Your observations are about phylogenetic aspects of negation, whereas my observations are about deeper, semiotic aspects of negation, and about the relations between the external world, and language (or thought) as systems of mediation and representation.