A new article by Andrew Ollett, Matteo Pascucci and myself has been published OA on History and Philosophy of Logic. You can download it here. Don’t forget to let me know what you think about it!

In contrast to his willingness to play down the differences with his Prābhākara opponents, Śālikanātha is quite straightforward in denying the understanding of arthāpatti, which he attributes to an anonymous opponent, and is clearly influenced by the Ślokavārttika’s treatment of the issue.
According to this opponent, the absence from home is the trigger insofar as it is itself thrown into doubt. Śālikanātha starts by asking how could this impossibility be conceived and comes with two possible options:

1. It is impossible insofar as the absence of the one is invariably connected with the absence of the other.

2. It is impossible insofar as the absence from home is impossible as long as one does not postulate the presence of Caitra outside.

The second option is easy to defeat, since it is not the absence from home which does not make sense, but rather only the being alive of Caitra. Why should one in fact doubt the absence from home once one has seen that Caitra is not there?

The first option deserves, by contrast, a longer treatment. Śālikanātha argues that it is tantamount to an inference based on negative concomitance only (kevalavyatirekin anumāna). This requires a short explanation: According to the Indian theory of inference, the inference is valid if sādhya and hetu don’t just happen to co-occur by chance, but are rather linked by an invariable concomitance. This is checked through the co-occurrence of the same inferential reason in similar instances (called sapakṣa) and its absence in dissimilar instances (called vipakṣa).

A valid inference should have both a positive concomitance (called anvaya) and a negative one (called vyatireka). However, epistemologists have discussed also the deviant case of inferences which seem to have only an anvaya, because there is no vipakṣa (e.g. “Everything is a product” for the Diṅnāga-Dharmakīrti school) or only a vyatireka, because there is no sapakṣa (e.g., “Nothing is eternal, because permanence is nowhere to be found”, again for the Diṅnāga-Dharmakīrti school).

Śālikanātha contends that the latter type does not work, because in order to establish the absence of the inferential reasons from all the dissimilar instances, one should be able to check them one by one, which is impossible. By contrast, the negative concomitance can be established only on the basis of a previously established positive concomitance, just as it happens in the case of the concomitance of fire and smoke.

The next step is even more interesting, since Śālikanātha suggests that the negative concomitance is established on the basis of the positive one exactly through arthāpatti. In fact, it is through arthāpatti that we know that, given that whenever there is the inferential reason there is also the thing to be inferred. Then, given that the absence of the thing to be inferred could not be possible otherwise, one concludes that also the inferential reason must be absent.

Therefore, the solution proposed by the opponent does not work since it leads to a kevalavyatirekin inference which is, in turn, parasitical on arthāpatti, since one first needs to ascertain the positive concomitance and then use arthāpatti to come to the negative concomitance. Once one has known the negative concomitance, as observed by Kumārila, one might well perform an inference on the basis of the established concomitance, but one would only end up knowing something already known, namely that Caitra is out (see ŚV arthāpatti, especially v. 67 with Uṃveka’s and Pārthasārathi’s commentaries thereon and Sucarita’s commentary on v. 19).

As for the “connection with an outer place” (bahirdeśasambandha), this is not further specified, so that we don’t know whether it just means “connection with any place other than his house” or “connection with a specific place outside his house”.

In favour of the latter option come two considerations:

1. Uṃveka discusses once the type of invariable concomitance one would need to be able to establish in order to make the arthāpatti a case of inference and refers to the fact that one should be on the door’s threshold and see at the same time Caitra’s absence from home and his presence in the garden (see the translation and discussion of Uṃveka’s crucial commentary on ŚV arthāpatti 34 in Freschi and Ollett’s translation).
2. If “outside of house” just meant “not in the house”, then Śālikanātha’s point about having to check all dissimilar instances would not make sense, since one would just need to check the single dissimilar instance, namely Caitra’s home. Therefore, it must mean “connected with a specific place outside of home”.

One of the leitmotifs of Andrew Ollett’s review (for which, let me repeat it, I am deeply grateful) is that he suggests locating the work of Rāmānujācārya historically, perhaps by comparing his sources and methodology with what was happening in Benares in the 16h and 17th centuries (and about which one might want to read the studies by Anand Venkatkrishnan). Again, as for context, Ollett suggests identifying the abhiyukta ‘experts’ mentioned in the following quote with lexicographers (against my hypothesis of identifying them with Viśiṣṭādvaitins on the basis of the context and of the occurrences of abhiyukta in the Tantrarahasya):

devatoddeśena dravyatyāgo yāga ity abhiyuktopadeśaś ceti. (TR IV, 9.4.4)

And it is instructed by learned people that the sacrifice is the relinquishing of the substances in the name of the deity

On a different note, Ollett notes that some of the parallels with Western philosophers (which he, overall, praises), for instance “von Wright’s formalization of Thomistic deontics (pp. 124–127) do not immediately help us to understand the positions that Rāmānujācārya represents” (p. 635). This is a problem most of us have to come to terms with, since comparisons often risk to require much energy before they can at all lead somewhere. In fact, they often need a double expertise in order to be effective. Nonetheless, I still think that we comparisons are just unavoidable. I hope that my more recent works on deontic logic (together with A. Ciabattoni, B. Lellmann and F. Genco, see for instance here) could spread more light on the parallel with von Wright and on its usefulness in understanding conundrums such as the Śyena one.

Similarly, Ollett on the one hand thinks that my charts and schemes are “necessary”, while on the other he notes that I “rarely explain precisely what relations the arrows signify”, which is true, I must admit. I will do better in the future, now that I know that not everyone shares my intuitions regarding arrows.

In the second paragraph of p. 635, Ollett discusses my analysis of the arthabhāvanā as being the object which is caused to be by the svargabhāvanā. Apart from indirectly noting a typo (a missed -m in yāgakaraṇā svargabhāvanā), Ollett notes that “śābdī– and ārthībhāvanā are joined incoherently […], since it is the Vedas, and not the person addressed by the injunction, that bring-into-being the bringing-into-being of heaven on the part of the person addressed by the injunction”. Now, although Ollett is right that the śabdabhāvanā (I prefer this terminology, since śābdībhāvanā is later and is not found in Rāmānujācārya) pertains to language and causes to be the initiation of the activity by the person, svargakāmo yajeta imposes an obligation on the svargakāma. It is him, not the Vedas, who is addressed by the injunction as the one upon which the duty to bring about a sacrificial activity rests. In this sense, and taking into account Ollett’s objections, svargakāmo yajeta can perhaps be paraphrased as yāgakaraṇāṃ svargaphalabhāvanām bhāvayet ‘he should undertake an activity leading to heaven and having the sacrifice as its instrument’. An alternative (and easier) way out could be to stop at yagakāraṇena svargam bhāvayet. Or, if one wants to make the śabdabhāvanā explicit and take the risk of hiding its imperative character, yāgakaraṇāṃ svargaphalabhāvanāṃ bhāvayitum (vedaiḥ) prerito’sti.

A second point mentioned by Ollett regards a sentence found at p. 88, where I show how the verbal root expresses both content and instrument. Ollett would have probably liked both elements to be signalled in the Sanskrit paraphrasis, like they are in the scheme before the paraphrasis.

The review makes further subtle points, aiming at understanding better terms which I translated in a “less specific” way. I am surprised (but I should not, knowing Ollett as a sarvajña-to-be) by Ollett’s easyness in understanding the intricacies of the text (something I spent years on). I welcome, in this sense, Ollett’s glosses of aidamarthya (“a condition of standing in a teleological relationship that must be ‘fulfilled’ in the construal of all prescriptions”) and of codaka (“a rule of transference of elements from the archetype into the ectype”). By contrast, I thought that saying that a prescription “promotes” the performance of a sacrifice could have been understood easily enough to mean that the prescription causes the sacrificer to perform the sacrifice (whereas Ollett laments that I have used this term “without explaining what it would mean for a prescription to ‘promote’ the performance of a sacrifice”). Once again, my lack of command of English may have deluded me.

Ollett does not suggest any emendation in the Sanskrit text, although he notes that the Telegu manuscript collated was probably the same one used by the original editor and that the variants are all due to conjectures or typos (note that the Tantrarahasya has been edited twice and that the Telegu manuscript I collated was known to the second editor, who believed it was an additional manuscript to the one used in the first edition). This brings me back to the problem of whether one should collate all manuscripts available or not. In the case of my book, the first reason for reproducing the text of the Tantrarahasya was the apparatus with parallel texts and sources (the variant readings of the Telegu manuscript alone would not have prompted me to prepare a new edition). On the other hand, one could always suggest (see Petra’s comments to the post linked to above), that the more evidence the better and that collating additional manuscripts gives at least more reasons to accept or reject the text as it had been previously edited.

Let me close with one of Ollett’s flattering remarks:

Although less comprehensive, it [=the book] does for Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā what Edgerton’s version of the Mīmāṃsānyāyaprakāśa and Benson’s recent (2010) version of the Mīmāṃsānyāyasaṃgraha have done for Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā, namely to make these valuable overviews of their respective systems available to a wider audience.

Last, let me note that ironically, one of the “examples of the value added by Freschi’s commentary” was the topic of a paper I submitted to a WSC. It was rejected, something which makes me once again aware of how many among my best results (the papers on deontic logic, the books on textual reuse, the paper on Jayanta’s linguistics) originate out of previous rejections (but perhaps there is no causal relation other than the fact that I received many rejections).

• by Taisei Shida on Vol. 31 of Nagoya Studies in Indian Culture and Buddhism. Saṃbhāṣā (2014), pp. 84-87.
• by Andrew Ollett on Vol. 65.2 of Philosophy East and West (2015), pp. 632–636 (see here)
• by Gavin Flood on Vol. 8.3 of Journal of Hindu Studies (2015), pp. 326–328, (the beginning is accessible here)
• by Hugo David on the vol. 99 of BEFEO (2012-13), pp. 395-408 (you can read the beginning here)

I am extremely grateful to the reviewers (I could not have hoped for better ones!) for their careful and stimulating analyses and for their praising my attempts to make the text as understandable as possible and to locate sources and parallels in the apparatus. In fact, as a small token of gratitude for the time they spent on my book, I will dedicate a post to each one of their reviews, where I discuss their corrections and suggestions. The first one in this series will appear next Friday.

This semester, I will be teaching about linguistics and philosophy of language* in classical India. The topic is too vaste, so I will need to make some drastic choices. The following are the elements of the narrative I will be following:

The philosophical arena in classical** India has three main protagonists, which are constantly responding to each other, namely Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya and the Buddhist Epistemological School. In the case of linguistics, two further schools enter the debate. On the one hand, Nyāya and even more so Mīmāṃsā have to answer to the challenges of the Vyākaraṇa (‘Grammar’) school which first focused on linguistic analyses of morphemes, but after Bhartṛhari (5th c.?) offered comprehensive accounts of the way language conveys knowledge. On the other hand, the school of Poetics (alaṅkāraśāstra) reused elements of the Mīmāṃsā and of the Nyāya theories and elaborated them further (see two recent articles by Hugo David and Andrew Ollett).

As for the main contents of the debate, a core concern is the identification of three elements, namely the identity of the signifier (vācaka), of the signified (vācya) and of their relation (sambandha). As for the first, does the vācaka consist of the phonemes? If so, of them collectively or one by one? Of their phonic form or of their essential characters? If not, does it consist of the words? Of the sentences? Or of something being manifested by words, but not identical with them, like the Grammarians’ sphoṭa?
As for the vācya, discussants argued for its identification with individuals or with universals, with a mental idea or with the exclusion of anything else.
Last, as for the sambandha, the Mīmāṃsakas believe it to be intrinsic and not available to human beings. Naiyāyikas, by contrast, consider it to be conventional. Experts of poetics will combine at different times Mīmāṃsā elements (such as the theory of bhāvanā, see again the two articles mentioned above) with the Naiyāyikas’ openness to the creativity of single authors. Grammarians, in turn, agree with Mīmāṃsā on the intrinsic relation between signifier and signified, but identify the former with the sphoṭa, thus violating the Mīmāṃsā’s commitment to what Westerners call the Ockham’s razor (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem).

* I am forced to use two terms due to the lack of correspondence between Western and Indian categories.
** The situation was different before the first centuries AD and changed after the first millennium.

• vid- is etymologically linked with the act of seeing (as in Ancient Greek οἶδα, literally ‘I have seen’, but used in the sense of ‘I know’). It thus indicates what one has experienced and thus knows for sure. Moreover, vid- indicates a lasting knowledge, one which is valid and which one will be able to keep in one’s memory for at least a long time. Accordingly, the vidyās are branches of learning, like the German Wissenschaften. Long story short, use verbs such as ‘to know’ to translate it.
• jñā-, by contrast, indicates an act of cognition (as shown by B.K. Matilal). It is thus not necessarily valid and it is instantaneous. One performs an act of jñā- when one erroneously grasps water in the desert, or when one dreams. And the single jñānas are just single ‘cognitions’ which one does not keep forever. vijñāna may add to that a nuance of ‘discriminative, dialectic cognition’, which makes it necessarily valid, but the distinction between jñāna and vijñāna is a moot issue, as proved by the commentaries on the one or the other. Long story short, use verbs such as ‘to cognize’ to translate jñā-.

In non-Śāstric contexts, jñāna can acquire different meanings and its non discriminative nature can be seen as an advantage, so that it can even ultimately amount to ‘insight’ or ‘wisdom’.

What are your translations for jñā– and vid-?

]]> https://elisafreschi.com/2015/06/26/keywords-jna-and-vid/feed/ 2 1767 https://elisafreschi.com/2015/01/30/arthapatti-in-the-manameyodaya/ https://elisafreschi.com/2015/01/30/arthapatti-in-the-manameyodaya/#comments Fri, 30 Jan 2015 08:22:42 +0000 elisa freschi http://elisafreschi.com/?p=1370 The Mānameyodaya is the standard primer for Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā epistemology. It is written in the clear style of other 17th c. primers and it is smooth and agreeable to read. These are just some of the reasons for choosing it for the first meeting of a virtual Sanskrit reading group initated by Malcolm Keating (see this post, which is also an open invitation for anyone to join). More in detail, we started reading the section on arthāpatti, which is an instrument of knowledge accepted by (Pūrva and Uttara) Mīmāṃsakas, but considered as a subset of inference by Naiyāyikas and other schools.

Arthāpatti is the postulation of the only possible solution out of a seeming contradiction, e.g. “Devadatta is alive” and “Devadatta is not in the place where we usually see him” (this is expressed in Sanskrit epistemology by “Devadatta is not at home”, in contemporary terms we could think of something like “What happened of Jim? He is not in his office!”). Different contemporary scholars have tried to discuss the relation of arthāpatti with ‘presumption’ and ‘inference to the best explanation’.

The following is a translation of the beginning of the arthāpatti section in the Mānameyodaya:

1. DEFINITION OF ARTHĀPATTI

“Arthāpatti is the postulation of [something] producing [a solution] when there is a logical impossibility”: this is the definition explained in the Śābara Bhāṣya || 128 ||

As for this definition, the “logical impossibility” is said to be the contradiction between two [types* of] instruments of knowledge. Therefore, the following definition [of the arthāpatti] should be taught:

Arthāpatti is defined as the cognition of something non-contradictory caused by the contradiction between instruments of knowledge about general topics, and ones about a specific topic || 129 ||
For instance, the postulation of being outside of home due to the contradiction, which is instrumental [for the arousal of postulation], between the knowledge of his not being at home and the knowledge of his being alive || 130 ||

One understands in general that Devadatta is alive, either at home or outside, due to an inference based on astrology (i.e., because out of astrological calculations one knows that he will live a long life). There being a contradiction with the fact that he is not at home, one hypothesises —for the sake of the non-contradiction— that he must be out. And this is an arthāpatti-cognition whose instrument is the contradiction between the two [types] of instruments of knowledge.

2. NAIYĀYIKA POSITION: THE ARTHĀPATTI IS A FORM OF ANUMĀNA

However, the experts of logic (i.e., the Naiyāyikas), thinking that this (arthapatti) is a form of inference, say that |
“there is no contradiction between the two [types of] instruments of knowledge. And this (non-contradiction) is the same in the case of everything well-known” (NKu 3.11)|| 131 ||

[Nai:] To begin with, it is impossible that there is a contradiction between instruments of knowledge, since there would be the undesirable consequence that one of the two is not an instrument of knowledge, as in the case of “this is silver, this is not silver” (where one of the two ends up being recognised as not valid).

[Obj.] But nonetheless, one does see a contradiction between the two knowledges about which we spoke before (in the case of Devadatta)!

[Naiyāyika:] This is just a wish! In fact, in the case at hand, the room for doubt** regarding the specific place, namely ‘is he at home or outside?’ is blocked by the knowledge of his not being at home.

*dvaya must refer to two types of instrument of knowledge, and not just to two instruments of knowledge, given that the next verse explains that the contradiction may be between a specific knowledge and several general ones (sādharaṇapramāṇānām). Thanks to Andrew Ollett for having discussed this issue with me.
**The Naiyāyika is here speaking of doubt instead of logical inconsistency, probably because the former, unlike the latter, is among the padārthas his school accepts.

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