Abstract
Ever since some traditional protagonists made the intriguing claim that the Vedas (canonical Brahmāṇical texts) are an inviolable resource of authority on significant matters, extensive debate has raged in Indian thought as to whether word can rightfully be accepted as pramāṇa or autonomous mode of knowing; in western epistemological terms, as testimony? At the mundane level the doctrine underscores the capacity of language, i.e., words and sentences (sabda), to disseminate knowledge from speaker/author to hearer/audience; at a transcendental level it adverts to wisdom-texts delivering knowledge about supramundane matters. Unlike the former, the words of the latter may be literally authorless: truth is begot from what the sages of yore simply ‘heard’, somehow, and came to know. But J. N. Mohanty has rejected this doctrine, arguing that sentences can certainly generate linguistic meaning or intentionality – understanding that p. But since this does not come stamped with evidential warrant (‘fact’), it may not amount to knowledge that p; at best it may generate belief about injunctions and imperatives (‘ought’ but not indicatively ‘is’, nor objective moral knowledge). The chapter is a response to what I call the Mohanty-Gettier Paradox, and a case is argued for the viability of śabda-based testimony, drawing on phenomenology of language and hermeneutics.
This is a revised and updated version of the author’s paper “Authorless Voice, Tradition and Authority in the Mimamsa – reflections of cross-cultural hermeneutics,” published in Nagoya Studies in Indian Culture and Buddhism: Saṃbhāṣā 16, 1995
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Notes
- 1.
See Gadamer (1988, 353–4): “Certainly, in relation to language, writing seems a secondary phenomenon. The sign language of writing refers back to the actual language of speech. But that language is capable of being written is by no means incidental to its nature. Rather, this capacity of being written down is based on the fact that speck itself shares in the pure ideality of the meaning that communicates itself in it.” Besides, highly literate cultures seem to have felt the need for writing to give stability and a sense of permanence to their cultural coding, accumulated wisdom, rhetoric, as also their excesses, in the way that non-literate cultures (and I am more familiar with the Australian Aboriginals) exploited other avenues for coding their cultural `secrets’, history and ways of disseminating these, such as through songs, painting, markings on earth, carvings, and so on. For a trenchant criticism of the “tyranny of the written word” see Sullivan (1990, 41–59).
- 2.
Cohen is citing the double-quoted judgments from Max Müller and S. Radhakrishnan respectively.
- 3.
apauruṣeyaṃ vākyaṃ vedaḥ (Gajendragadkar & Karmarkar, 1984, 7).
- 4.
Apart from the Mīmāṃsā, some other darśanikas entertained a similar thesis of a differential yet inseparable relation of word and meaning. The Grammarians view the relation between the name and the nameable to be anadiyogyata (a beginningless capacity) (Kavirāja, 1984); Bhāmaha’s definition of kāvya also echoes something of this unity, for whom “expression and meaning is combined (śabdārthau sahitau) (Warder, 1978, 31).
- 5.
Śabara had considered the relation (as well as the word and its meaning) to be the same in both (empirical) laukika- and (scriptural) vedavacanam, though he reserved the term śabdapramāṇa specifically for codanās (injunctive expressions) to cover vidhis and arthavādas; only with Bhāṭṭas śabdapramāṇa gets extended to laukikavacanam as well, with codanā as the limiting case for the vijñana of dharma; admitting that certain words in the Veda do not occur in ordinary discourse: so how is their relation fixed? For discussion see D’Sa (1980, 46).
- 6.
- 7.
Ninian Smart made this remark (recorded) in response to my paper on Śabda and Śruti: Tradition and Authority’, at an Asian and Comparative Philosophy Conference in Honolulu, 1984.
- 8.
- 9.
In this context Gadamer’s view may be compared: “We must understand properly the nature of the fundamental priority of language the critical superiority which we claim over language is not concerned with the conventions of linguistics expression, but with the conventions of meaning that have found their form in language. Thus it says nothing against the essential connection between understanding and language. In fact it confirms this connection” (Gadamer, 1988, 362).
- 10.
A detailed treatment appears in Bilimoria (1997)..
- 11.
For a critique of Mohanty’s guarded and mistaken reading of the thesis of śabdapramāṇa, informed by Hegelian ethics and Fregean linguistics, see Bilimoria (2000).
- 12.
Some of the discussion here is cribbed from my introductory essay to Mohanty (1993).
- 13.
Gadamer has been criticized, particularly by Habermas, for comprising reason or instrumental rationality in the effort to retrieve the experience of the past, without as it were throwing history a little forward to see if it meets the criteria of adequacy in all respects that we have learnt to date. For discussion see, for instance, Warnke (1987).
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Bilimoria, P. (2023). Testimony, Authorless Text, and Tradition: Toward Hermeneutic Pluralism. In: Vestrucci, A. (eds) Beyond Babel: Religion and Linguistic Pluralism. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42127-3_14
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