Logic in Tamil Didactic Literature

Abstract

Demonstrating that there had been an ancient logical tradition native to the Tamil society, Nirmal Selvamony has, in a paper entitled, “The Syllogistic Circle in tolkāppiyam” (The syllogistic circle in tolkāppiyam. 65th Session of the Indian Philosophical Congress. Madurai-Kamaraj University, Madurai, 27–29 Dec. Unpublished Paper, 1990; J Tamil Stud 57 & 58: 117–134, 2000), identified the five-member syllogism central to the tradition. He has also shown that kāṇṭikai had perfect application to Tamil didactic texts and was significantly different from the universally adopted Aristotelian three-member syllogism. The early tendency of the Tamils was to identify logic with philosophy and religion. Taking a departure from this tendency, he recovers the original definition of kāṇṭikai from iḷampūraṇār’s commentary on tolkāppiyam. This chapter tries to identify the structure of arguments in Tamil didactic verses employing the kāṇṭikai form. The application of kāṇṭikai to diverse Tamil texts as an analytic tool has no hermeneutic intent, but the tool gets itself defined in the process. The argument of this chapter is that the efficiency of the different members of kāṇṭikai can be better appreciated when their correspondence to those of the jurisprudential model of argument, described by Stephen Toulmin, is traced. Taking a clue from Toulmin, it is also argued that many Tamil didactic texts have what Collingwood calls “absolute presuppositions” and that these presuppositions have correspondence to “warrants” in the jurisprudential structure of argument. The ubiquitous analogy and recursive analogical reasoning found in Tamil texts can also be accommodated in this model of argument when the features of an analogy are seen as the “datum” in the jurisprudential model. This helps us overcome the problem in claiming application of logic to didactic texts of preceptorial tone, the arguments of which, though often seen as assertions and affirmations on authority, do have warrants and also backing for their warrants. The arguments of Tamil didactic verses, when cast in the kāṇṭikai form of argument thus eclectically constructed, allow us to clearly see the unstated presupposition of every one of them.