Abstract
The present paper is about three concepts which are crucially involved in Gaṅgeśa's interpretation of a Mīmāṃsā argument against the well-known design inference of the existence of God in Nyāya, namely the concepts “cognition” (jñāna), “certitude” (niścaya) and “doubt” (saṃśaya). According to Maheśa Chandra, the author of the Navya-Nyāya manual Brief Notes on the Modern Nyāya System of Philosophy and its Technical Terms, certitude and doubt are the two varieties of cognition. He illustrates the verbal expression of certitudes by means of declaratives and the verbal expression of doubts by means of interrogatives (functioning as polar or alternative questions). He notes also that different credence levels might be associated with the alternatives involved in a speaker’s doubt. A biassed question in the form of a tag interrogative might be an appropriate way to express such a doubt. In Western logic the idea to treat declaratives and interrogatives on a par, which is anticipated by the Navya-Naiyāyikas' use of the unifying concept of “cognition”, goes back to Frege’s distinction between the semantic content (the “thought”) of a sentence and its force and it was recently elaborated by Ciardelli, Farkas, Groenendijk, Roelofsen et al., the founders of a new branch in logic called “inquisitive logic”. In the present paper we will discuss Maheśa Chandra's succinct exposition of the Navya-Naiyāyikas' innovative approach from the perspective of this type of logic. As an offshoot of our analysis we will try to elucidate Gaṅgeśa's apologetic concerns about the well-known design inference of the existence of God in Nyāya and its liability to be vitiated by a dubious upādhi.
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Notes
The meaning of saṃśaya is not confined to “distrust”, i.e., a tendency to disbelieve something, which is one of the possible meanings of “doubt” (cf. Stein, 1983, s.v. “doubt”). According to Apte saṃśaya is also used in the sense of “suspicion” (Apte, 1992, s.v. saṃśaya), i.e., it can also express a tendency to believe something. Thus, Maheśa Chandra classifies saṃbhāvanā (“expectation”) as a special type of saṃśaya (cf. sections “BN’s niścaya/saṃśaya-Section in Maheśa Chandra's Own Words” and “Biassed and Unbiassed Doubts” below). In English the use of “doubt” in the sense of “suspicion” has survived only in archaic examples (cf. the following quotation from Sir Walter Scott's The Antiquary: “But I doubt, I doubt, I have been beguiled!”). Nevertheless, Stein lists “suspect” as one of the possible synonyms of the verb “doubt” (cf. Stein, 1983, s.v. “doubt”). Moreover, saṃśaya is used in a noncommittal sense in Navya-Nyāya, i.e., in the sense of a neutral or unbiassed “uncertainty” (cf. Apte, 1992, s.v. saṃśaya and Maheśa Chandra's observation in BN's niścaya/saṃśaya-section that “in some cases of a doubt, the two alternatives are equal”). Similarly, “doubt” is used in English in sentences such as “His appointment to this position is still in doubt” to express “a feeling of uncertainty about the truth, reality or nature of something” (Stein, 1983, ibid.).
The footnote is missing in the edition in Jha (2004).
BN bhāsate
BN vr̥kṣa-niṣṭhā ekā
BN mavati
Ingalls translates prakāra as “chief-qualifier” and he explains the meaning of this concept as follows: “Where a qualificand has two qualifiers, one expressed in the subject and one in the predicate, that expressed in the predicate is distinguished as the prakāra or chief qualifier. Thus in the knowledge ‘The tall man (is) handsome’, height is simply a qualifier (viśeṣaṇa), but beauty is the chief qualifier (prakāra). When a qualificand has only one qualifier, as in ‘This (is) a man’ (qualifier = man-ness), the terms ‘qualifier’ and ‘chief qualifier’ are interchangeable. Naturally the qualifier or chief qualifier may in turn have other qualifiers. A further use of the term ‘chief qualifier’ (prakāra) is in the analysis of knowledges. In the knowledge ‘pot-possessing (is) the ground’ pot may be called the chief qualifier of the knowledge ‘pot-possessing (is) the ground’ as well as the chief qualifier of ground.” (Ingalls, 1951, p. 43) However, in Maheśa Chandra’s analysis of the sentence “This Rāma, who is loyal to Janaka, is respectable” (cf. BN: 21, 5f) the term prakāra is also applied to “loyalty to Janaka”. Similarly, in Ingalls’s above-mentioned example “tall” might be called a prakāra as well. Maheśa Chandra notes that prakāra is just another name for viśeṣaṇa (“qualifier”, cf. BN: 20, 2) and he distinguishes in his example between “loyalty to Janaka” and “respectability” by calling the latter a “primary” (mukhya) prakāra. Therefore we regard prakāra and viśeṣaṇa here as synonymous and render both as “qualifier”.
The counterpositive (pratiyogin) is the absentee of an absence. Human-beingness, e.g., is the counterpositive of the absence of human-beingness.
Recall Ingalls’s remark on the use of the word prakāra in relation to cognitions (cf. fn. 6 above): In Navya-Nyāya a qualifier in a cognition (as its object) may be regarded as the qualifier of the cognition.
utkaṭa (“superior”) is here obviously meant in the sense of “more likely”.
Āśvina is the name of a month in which the moon is near the constellation of the Aśvins, “the two physicians of the gods who are represented as the twin sons of the Sun by a nymph in the form of a mare” (Apte, 1992, s.v. aśvin).
Name of a lunar month corresponding to August – September
“Intonation refers to a change in a pitch contour across the duration of a sentence, or other large unit of language. One very obvious use of intonation found in many languages is to use a falling pitch contour for declarative utterances and a rising pitch contour for yes/no questions, as in: (3) You know how to get there. (3′) You know how to get there?” (Davies et al., 2004, p. 33)
It should be noted that the typology of verbal expressions of certitudes and doubts discussed here derives from an analysis of Maheśa Chandra’s account of the way certitudes and doubts are rendered in Sanskrit. The author of the present article does not intend to set forth his own linguistic theory on this matter. Maheśa Chandra’s examples are a token of his awareness that different sentence types are at stake here. By categorizing these sentence types according to modern linguistic terminology as “declaratives” and “interrogatives posing polar or alternative questions” we do not intend to insinuate that Maheśa Chandra himself used similar descriptive categories in BN.
The page reference is to the translated version, Frege, 1956.
Bealer's square bracket notation with subscripted binding variables is a variant of the notation for λ-terms in λ-calculus. However, his property terms should not be regarded as extensional or intensional descriptions of functions. They rather denote properties as intensional metaphysical objects. Therefore Bealer's approach is closer to the understanding of properties in Navya-Nyāya than most versions of λ-calculus. (More information on the relation between Bealer's logic and λ-calculus can be gleaned from Alama (2017).)
Any kind of individuals can be related to each other as qualificand (viśeṣya) and qualifier (viśeṣaṇa). The fire on a mountain is as much a qualifier of the mountain as the property “mountainness”. Thus, the use of Q is not confined to that of a mere predication relation. The second member of an ordered pair <x,y> of which Q is true can be a property as well as a particular.
Bealer would use the ∆-relation here instead of Q. In his property adaptations of set theory a∆[A(x)]x functions as a counterpart of the set-theoretic formula a ∈ {x | A(x)} (cf. Bealer, 1982, pp. 82 and 96).
We translated also the Sanskrit words sa-vikalpaka and nir-vikalpaka as “determinate” and “indeterminate”, respectively (cf. section “Introduction”). In the present context we are obviously concerned with another meaning of these expressions.
This issue concerning the number of alternatives in a doubt is also mentioned in the NKoś, which names the Nīlakaṇṭhī as its source: ayaṃ saṃśayâkāras tu viruddha-bhāva-dvaya-koṭika-saṃśayâṅgī-kāreṇôpapadyate. pare tu sthāṇutva-tad-abhāva-puruṣatva-tad-abhāva-koṭika iti tad-vākyârtha ity āhuḥ. (NKoś, s.v. saṃśayaḥ: 930f) – “This form of a doubt (author’s note: the one which corresponds to the alternative question whether something is a trunk or a man) is obtained due to accepting a doubt which has two alternatives, namely something present and something which is opposed to it. But others say that the meaning of this expression is ‘something which has as alternatives trunkness and the absence of that and manness and the absence of that’.”
Cf. Jha’s translations “whether there will be rain in the month of Aśvina” and “whether there will be rains in the month of Bhādrapada” (Jha, 2004, p. 135).
Tag interrogatives (also known as “tail questions”) consist of a declarative or an imperative statement and an attached interrogative fragment (the “tag”), which turns the whole into a question. In the case of the sentence “There is rain in the month Bhādra, isn’t it?”, e.g., the statement “There is rain in the month Bhādra” is turned into a question by the tag “isn’t it”.
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Guhe, E. Maheśa Chandra’s Exposition of the Navya-Nyāya Concept of “Cognition” (jñāna) from the Perspective of Inquisitive Logic. J Indian Philos 50, 835–864 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-022-09519-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-022-09519-z