Some sixty years ago, some Indians began to suspect that Indian logical 'Nyaya' or 'Vakyapadiya' linguistic philosophy or Jain syadvad 'fuzzy logic' might have some marvelous property connected to 'cognitive science' or whatever it was Chomsky was up to. Then, we realized, the thing was a waste of time.
Save in matters of sectarian doctrine (matam), where- perhaps in response to Gautama's Nyaya-sutra- Theologian-Saints, like Umasvati, Nagarjuna, Sankara etc, so 'reverse-mathematicised' (i.e. winnowed out axioms) in their respective doctrines as to make them 'observationally equivalent'- Indians, more particularly because their economy was growing rapidly, considered reasoning to be a pragmatic activity- an empirical Science or Vigyaan- pursued to some useful end. Truth- याथार्थ्य:- is that which it is useful to attain- which is why we have a predisposition to verify it or, to simplify or speed up matters, have an emotional response to it such that it is action-guiding to our benefit and profit.
I have commented, somewhat unkindly, on Matilal's misprision of Gangesha elsewhere. What I failed to mention was that it it was a Nyaya dogma that the mind processes knowledge sequentially. Yet something like 'parallel processing' means we are frequently in 'two minds' about a thing. However, when discharging a duty in a protocol bound manner, or when giving an account of our having done so, we have to pick on one connected train of thought as if 'the mark of the mind' was what we call 'concurrency'. But this is purely a matter of utility. No larger ontological commitment is required. If we say 'things which are true are knowable and nameable' this is merely a useful working assumption in certain protocol bound contexts which arise by reason of collective action problems. But there is compartmentalization in such cases. We may say 'to the legal mind, x is the case' whereas ' in foro conscientiae, or to the feeling heart, x is not the case' while adding 'to the mind of the economist, 'x' is mis-specified'. Now, the very same person may say all these things. Since the man is the Chief Justice, we may say he has spoken authoritatively of the 'legal mind's' settled view on the matter. However we may doubt that his conscience or his 'feeling heart' is quite as angelic as he would have us think. Economist too might ridicule the CJI's statement about what they would think, though, no doubt, they'd try to scratch each others eyes out if he tried to gain a consensus amongst themselves regarding 'x'.
Still, though the mind is myriad, for the purposes of Jurisprudence, it is actually very useful if it is univocal on points of law even if its practitioners have wide differences on every other matter. But this is a convention of an expedient or pragmatic type.
Some 30 years ago Arindam Chakrabarti published a silly paper which I will briefly quote and comment on.
Before doing so, I draw your attention to this statement of his published by the Telegraph- National pride is immoral because un-universalizable.
In that case it is immoral to wipe your own bum or even to care greatly that your bum should be wiped. Your concern must be with all bums everywhere which might need wiping. You must first wipe the bums of people lazier than you in the vicinity if you want to be considered a moral person. Moreover, since human morality is not universalizable to other sentient beings, humans should be as immoral as fuck.
Nyaya says the above is bad logic. There is an uncorrelated asymmetry of an informational type. You know the condition of your own bum. You don't know which other bums require wiping. You know your own country is good. You don't know which other countries are equally good or better. You can usefully proceed on the basis of 'determinate' (savikalpaka jnana) information you have. After all, it is mere conjecture, not inference, that your Boss or your Professor has a shitty bum and thus it would be a kindness to offer to wipe it for him.
Believing one’s own cultural heritage or religion to be the greatest in the world is unethical because you cannot consistently will that this maxim be universally and sincerely embraced as objectively true by all other peoples of the world.
It is not unethical if this is indeed the case. Indeed, people in other countries would thank you for opening their eyes to the immorality of eating all their babies. Love your country and try to make it the best. Don't be mean. Share news of its achievements with others.
What is Arindam's mistake? He ignores the 'uncorrelated asymmetries' which dictate eusocial strategies and which are the foundation of Oikeiosis. Indian thought never suffered from this defect. Its 'mimamsa' hermeneutics was always linked to pragmatic, Oikos based, 'Artha-shastra' economics and jurisprudence. It may be that some academics thought there was something Kantian about Navya Nyaya despite the fact that it is a pragmatic, not analytic, theory and focuses on usefulness (arthavat) as defining knowledge. Thus, this entire academic availability cascade was based on stupidity and ignorance- speaking of which let us hear Arindam's thoughts
On Knowing by Being Told
A person should know what he was or wasn't told provided he was paying attention and it was his duty, or in his interest, to do so. The proviso here is that the speaker should be saying something useful (arthavat) to qualify as a knowledge source.
Words are sometimes said to clothe our thoughts and beliefs.
Only if there would be some unseemliness or violation of relevant protocol if they appeared naked.
But, like some clothes, they usually reveal more than they conceal, often imposing shapes on our ideas which they might have lacked in their naked state.
Words, like clothes, can be used to emphasize particular points or distract from others. But they don't 'impose' anything. Either they serve their intended purpose or they don't.
Beliefs put on the dress of language not only when they are exhibited but also when they travel from one person to another.
Not necessarily. If I see people screaming and running away, I too run in the same direction. I don't care if they are naked or wearing Top Hats or are reciting Homer rather than screaming 'save me for the Holy sake of Fuck!'
Perhaps this whole sartorial imagery is wrongheaded.
It is.
The very notion of beliefs or awareness episodes in their prelinguistic nudity may be a myth.
Nonsense! We readily understand that the crying baby may be scared of the barking dog even though it can't speak.
However, while enough attention has been paid by recent philosophy to the phenomenon of expressing or displaying our thoughts, beliefs, or pieces of knowledge through our utterances, the major role of language in instilling information, in causing people to have true thoughts, and in generating knowledge has remained relatively neglected.
By shitheads. So what? Smart guys at IKEA figured out that you don't need to communicate through language. Stylized pictographs are good enough.
Too busy with explaining exhibition, we seem to have forgotten about the transmission of knowledge through the medium of speech.
If you can explain how the thing is exhibited you have have also explained how it is transmitted. This is because exhibition of any sort is the emitting of a signal. Transmission is achieved when the signal is correctly decoded. This is a case of co-evolution and may feature 'arms races' of various sorts.
Yet, as has been realized and elaborately articulated by Indian philosophers well over a thousand years ago, true utterances in a certain language are not only caused by pieces of knowledge acquired by the sincere and competent speaker but can themselves, in their turn, cause genuine knowledge in the unsuspecting audience that is trained in that language.
Nobody doesn't or didn't know this. Sincerity and competence and sharing a language don't matter. If it is useful for transmission to occur, a mechanism for it will exist. That is why humans can communicate with their hunting dogs so as to achieve a common goal. There has been co-evolution.
Indian philosophers did not think training in a particular language- e.g. Sanskrit- would itself cause 'unsuspecting' audiences to accept a doctrine (matam) as true. It wasn't the case that if you were well-spoken enough, you could convince Umasvati to give up Jainism or Nagarjuna to give up Buddhism. On the other hand empirical statements (Vigyaan) might be accepted if certain protocols were observed. Thus, you might be believed if you said 'the swan's feather can indeed separate milk from water. Watch as I show you how it is done. This experiment of mine has been validated by the physicians of the Royal Courts of the entire Gangetic plain.'
Reading books or newspapers, listening to experts' lectures or radio reports, or checking with parents or eyewitnesses, we come by such important pieces of knowledge as the knowledge that each cell in my body contains twenty-three pairs of chromosomes,
some do. Some don't- e.g. erythrocytes or mature red cells.
that the forest fire in Yellowstone National Park is spreading,
it isn't now.
or that I was born in September.
You may be wrong. Perhaps you were adopted.
Some of these pieces of information could have been obtained by some of us perceptually or inferentially, but all of them may actually be learned from verbal testimony. As H. H. Price pointed out, we not only have to take on trust such facts as how old each of us is, but even our knowledge of what day or date or year it is today is based on the evidence of testimony.
only according to the testimony of a cretin doing useless shit.
Until recently, it counted as a standard complaint against some classical Indian theories of knowledge that they recognize "Report of the Reliable" as an accredited source of or evidence for knowledge.
For certain types of protocol bound knowledge or adjudication- sure. But this is also the case in any court of law or administrative tribunal.
After the great 'linguistic turn' took place in the West,
it was shitty. Just when Physics and Math were taking us far outside familiar linguistic paradigms, psilosophers buried their heads in the sand and went in for bad philology or worse semantics.
comparative philosophers, who used to feel apologetic about the otherwise hardheaded Nyaya philosophy's concern with word-generated knowledge,
because Indian philosophy was about yogic levitation or miraculously defeating the cruel British, some 30,000 of whom were mercilessly oppressing 300 million Indians- probably because those Indians were too busy levitating and pooping on each other's heads.
started defensively to discover echoes and anticipations of contemporary issues in the elaborate ancient and medieval discussions by Indian philosophers on themes like the meanings of words, sentences, quantifiers, pronouns, proper names, negatives, imperatives, and so on.
If Western philosophy became stupid and useless, India had an obligation that Indian philosophers had always been even more stupid and useless.
The sheer opulence of dialectical materials and well-worked-out insights-on issues like the meanings of empty subject-terms, of existence denials, sentence-holism versus word-atomism, secondary (or metaphorical) versus literal (or first) meaning, the role of the speaker's intention in meaning-determination, and so on-sometimes dazzled our eyes.
It didn't dazzle the eyes of the descendants of Nawadwipa's Navya-Nyaya pundits. They quickly learnt a bit of English and made money as lawyers. The fact is there are certain rules for legal draughtsmanship which, if violated, lead to ambiguity and costly law suits at some future time. Nyaya had rules in the same way as the Chancery English of the lawyers had rules. Sometimes, it paid to pretend that they had been broken. Philosophy was a handmaiden to profitable employment in the Courts or the Administration. But Justice is only about utility as David Hume pointed out. Bentham may have fulmined against 'dog's law' but his disciples in Bengal didn't scruple to get rich by putting strained interpretations upon contracts and 'sanads'.
Arindam thinks that
haziness about the concept of word-generated awareness (sabdabodha)
verbal interpretation. The usual view is that some words used may be disregarded if not in keeping with the purpose of the sentence as a whole.
is... important.
In Law and Politics, this can indeed be the case. The Indian view is that verbal activity is the chief thing in a sentence and all the other words (excepting the one which expresses verbal activity) are subordinated to the verbal activity. Thus, some words may be 'read out' or 'read in' to a contract or law such that the purpose of the sentence- that which prompted the verbal activity- is properly served. But this is also the view taken by the law- unless Judges be kray kray in which case there is flight from the jurisdiction.
The fact is, Bengali Nyaya Pundits effortlessly transitioned into pleaders in British courts. Arindam know this. Yet he makes an astonishing claim- viz. the West understands sentences differently from Nyaya philosophy. The former understand stuff that is said. The latter gain 'awareness'. This causes the Indian to levitate and become one with the universe. It isn't true that the dude failed to show up for work because he was too lazy or drunken to do so.
The Nyaya- like many contemporary philosophers- does not admit intentional entities like meanings, propositions, or Fregean senses.
It does admit them as the raw material for Anuvyavasaya (अनुव्यवसाय) which is like judicial deliberation about what testimony or other evidence can or can't be admitted and what legal ratio should be applied to adjudicate the case.
Unless we admit a beliefless noncommittal state of apprehension (which we might call "mere comprehension"),
think of it as the lodging of various affidavits or exhibits some of which may be deemed admissible on the basis of further reflection or argumentation.
it becomes difficult to answer this question without losing sight of the distinction between word-generated awareness (roughly, trust)
but trust isn't 'word generated'. I trust that the leading medical specialist will give the correct diagnosis of my case even if I don't know a word of his language and wouldn't be able to understand it even if it were translated for me.
and the so-called understanding. So, Nyaya regards the trusting reception of information as the primary cognitive attitude to meaningful, nonfictional, nonfigurative speech.
This is not the case. What is required is 'bracketing'- i.e. accepting testimony and then deciding whether it is admissible. This was important at a time when different sects had very different 'Matams' or doctrines thought the 'Vigyaan' or empirical science was the same. We may speak of observational equivalence obtaining for the moment such that even testimony from a person with very different religious beliefs is accepted for some practical purpose.
Artha- in Sanskrit means both 'meaning' and what is profitable or useful- i.e. is utilitarian for economics or pragmatic politics. It may be that for 'Moksha', our doctrinal beliefs matter. But we can rub along well enough in commerce and the administration without deciding whether a guy who belongs to the false religion must necessarily be accounted a liar.
I wish in this essay to address the following three
issues.
(1) Is word-generated awareness (in the sense sketched above) classifiable as perception, memory, or inference?
It is the preliminary part of Anuvyavasaya- or a process of adjudication, where what is de facti or de juri is still a matter of contention. This may be protocol bound- i.e. the person doing it may have to show he had not prejudged the case or acted in a gullible or otherwise improper manner.
(2) Does the Nyaya account of the content of word-generated awareness in the general terms of qualificand (subject) and qualifier (predicated property) fail to work in the case of sentences in the nonindicative- especially imperative or optative-mood?
No. Why should it have any such infirmity? Testimony re. motive and character may or may not admissible in a court of law. But the same is true in other fields. We might be skeptical of a scientific claim which could make the scientist very very rich. But, if we follow protocols, we escape the charge of having dupes or paid lackeys.
(3) Is the Nyaya refusal to accept the "understanding followed by trust" picture based on a mistaken defense of gullibility?
No gullibility is involved if protocols are followed. Yes, there may have countervailing evidence. It wasn't admissible. Perhaps the protocols should be changed. But that is a separate matter.
when explaining the concept of a reliable authority, the "apta", Vatsyayana comments:
'By "apta" is meant any informer who has himself somehow directly apprehended the matter and is impelled by a natural desire to communicate facts as he has found them.... This definition applies equally to sages who have had direct vision of truth, to Aryans, and to Mlechhas or heretics.'
Thus the meaning of 'reliable authority' is one whom we can rely on for any purpose of our own. However, stricter protocols may apply if we are acting as an agent. Thus if an elderly servant tells you that your wife is fucking the dhobi, you may consider him reliable. But this may not be enough to get a divorce. Others in the community may say 'how can you take the word of an uneducated slave while disbelieving your own high-born wife?' Thus, you may have to arrange for high-born witnesses to catch her in flagrante.
Two things are to be noticed.
This cretin can't notice shit.
First, it is not enough to know the truth. Someone may know the facts, but either because she lacks the desire to pass this knowledge on to others, or because she is too lazy to talk communicatively, or deliberately refrains from telling the truth, or because he has a perverse misanthropy in him, he or she may not tell the truth or state it otherwise.
In which case such a person can't be an 'apta' by reason of being unreliable or of bad character.
But as long as there is no reason to suspect such abnormal features as mistake, delusion, deception, or defective sensory mechanism, the speaker can conventionally be taken not only to be one who expresses his purport but also to be one who communicates facts, giving us not only a piece of his mind but a glimpse of the world as he has known it.
No. The 'apta' must only give us relevant facts- i.e. ones which are useful for some purpose of our own. In Sanskrit, the word has the connotation of a friend or kinsman who knows what sort of information you need to hear.
Second, this is not intended as a defense of overcredulousness.
This cretin thinks you should listen to some nutter who enjoys reciting facts about things which are of no interest to you.
It might appear as if in emphasizing this knowledge-spreading function of speech
useful knowledge- i.e. stuff which raises productivity or improves decision making.
we are about to forget the notoriety which 'rumor'
'upashruti' in Sanskrit. It is very powerful.
-typically untrue information- has for its tendency to spread. The admission of words as a source of knowledge is no defense of overcredulousness or gullibility.
If it improved outcomes for you, that is all the defense you need provided you aren't breaking the law or violating relevant social or professional norms.
It is just the robust recognition of the fact that without this straightforward and natural method of handing down knowledge through language, not only religion or common morality but even science or historiography would be impossible.
What about the robust recognition of the fact that without shitting from time to time, our fucking intestines would explode? What is the point of doing PhD in Amrika if you start robustly recognizing that shitting, and speaking and breathing and eating nutritious food are essential? Without them, even Academic Philosophy- not to speak of useful types of research- would disappear. Kindly take shits regularly otherwise our Department will be closed down and I will lose my job.
It is not in spite of, but because of the progress of science that larger and larger amounts of findings, premises, theories, results of experiments, and technical know-how have to be taken on authority or learned directly from uttered or printed words.
No. The progress of science is irrelevant. We take stuff on authority, if this improves outcomes for us. If we get rich enough, we can hire reputable authorities on various useful subjects to make useful innovations so as to get even richer.
If each individual or generation had to perceive directly, verify inductively, or work out everything from scratch, then, as a famous Sanskrit couplet goes,
This world would be immersed in total darkness of ignorance, deprived of the
light which we call "speech'
What was novel and- in the traditional Indian scene- courageous of Nyaya was to extend the domain of sabda (word) as a source of knowledge to ordinary matters of fact- flouting deliberately the stricture imposed by other schools of thought as to the assignment
of specific sorts of knowables to specific ways of acquiring knowledge.
This is nonsense. Ancient Indian states had law courts and medical experts and agronomists and engineers and so forth. Nyaya-Vaisheshika was given a bit of philosophical gloss so that instruction in useful arts and sciences could be given by a more elite type of instructor. Similarly, in Islamic or Christian lands, a sort of theological gloss was given to medicine and alchemy and so forth. They were things you could study if you didn't want to end up just as a parish priest or local 'qadi' (judge).
To come back to our original uneasiness about the informational
content of commands or requests or moral injunctions: for one thing, we
must notice that the verb "to tell" is also used most naturally in the
context of an imperative utterance. Just as someone tells me what hap-
pened, someone tells me what to do, where to go, what to bring, and
so on. So, somehow the notion of 'what is told' must include both
states of affairs which can or cannot be the case, and actions which
should or should not be done.
All civilizations understood the distinction between imperative and alethic statements and the fact that a lot of statements mix both up together. But, for any given purpose, they may be factorized well enough. What is important is that protocols in this respect are not onerous and that their scrupulous observance does not lead to perverse outcomes.
The Nyaya theory of action has a general rule: from cognition flows desire, from desire volition, from volition effort, and from effort the actual performance of the action.
This is how agents justify their course of conduct. They show that they came to know something in the proper manner. They then conceived a desire such as the proper discharge of their duty obliged them to have. They then exercised their will and chose a course of action. They discharged this plan in a manner that remained scrupulously mindful of their obligations and the possible consequences, intended or unintended, of their actions.
If you are a principal, not an agent, you are welcome to have some desire of your own before you seek out information which will enable you to fulfil it.
The standard case of action-motivating desire comes from a triple
awareness: (a) awareness that performance of the action will produce
desirable results, (b) awareness that it will not produce undesirable results
strong enough to counterbalance the former, and (c) awareness that such
an act is within the power of the actor.
This is not the standard case. Some actions are mandatory even if the result is known to be adverse. We may say there is a 'Matsanyaya'- an imperative which is much bigger than any other consideration and which, so to speak, swallows them up in the way that a big fish eats up little fish.
Now, when S tells H to "Bring the cow," what H learns immediately from the utterance is the following: the addressee (in this case H, reflexively identified as "I myself" when the
information is received and as "you" when it is passed on) has to be an
agent of the act of bringing the cow.
This is not the case. H may not be employed by S. He may understand that S, who is elderly, has mistaken him for his own servant. H explains this and S apologizes. Arindam, no doubt, fetches cows for all and sundry. Does he also suck them off, if commanded to do so? Perhaps.
Since information or messages received from utterances must be capable of turning into knowledge- and knowledge is somehow essentially linked up with the truth of the content-the informational content must be such that it can be true (or false) on standard appropriate occasions.
Nonsense! The fact that you saw the fugitive and he said to you 'I'm not really here. This is a dream of yours.' is knowledge which contradicts its own content. Saying 'I'm not here' proves you are here.
As we know from the now- notorious problems of the separation and marriage of the assertoric force from/with the neutral content, in the Western analytic tradition, the only form which is suitable to bear truth seems to be the indicative form;
'factorization' could always get us to something useful enough to be deemed true. Ancient philosophers weren't stupid. Still, if they taught in the Academy, they had to tart up their lectures with pseudo-metaphysical shite because, back then, it was Theologians who made the big bucks and got all the posh totty.
thus the embedded content even of imperatives had to be construed in the qualificand-qualifier form, which is the Nyaya substitute for the Western subject-predicate form of "basic combination."
Any sort of imperative logic can be made equivalent to any other sort or given a mathematical description. So what? Either the thing is useful or only cretins study it in order to teach it to yet stupider credential craving hacks.
Orders are not as such capable of being true or false, hence Dummett's suggestion that we modify their correctness condition as obedience conditions. So the troublesome bit, namely "a has to be f" or "make a become f," in our initial construal of the content of an imperative utterance is reparsed as a kind of predication, where the predicated property was not apprehended as already actually residing in the qualificand or subject, but as "intendedly residing" or "commandedly residing" therein.
Yes, yes. We get it. You can shit out stuff like this till the cows come home. But cows are useful. You aren't. Even the barren cow fertilizes the land. What does bullshit do?
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