In the acquisition of verbal knowledge, the Nyāya school outlines four conditions of a linguistic utterance that must be met: āsatti (temporal proximity), ākāṅkṣā (syntactic expectancy), tātparya (speaker intention), and yogyatā (semantic fitness). I will follow the traditional Nyāya view that is it one of the four necessary conditions that enable a hearer to gain verbal knowledge. The reasoning behind retaining tātparya as a condition (or cause) of verbal knowledge, is that it provides a resource with which to clarify (...) ambiguity when contextual factors cannot. It also provides a context for a hearer so that the primary (abhidhā) or secondary (lakṣaṇā) meaning of the word, or sentence is understood. In this sense, tātparya imparts the meaning of a work. Examples such as “Bring saindhava” or “Hari” make the case for the importance of tātparya in that the meanings of these terms are ambiguous unless the context is provided or the speaker intends to mean one referent rather than another. In this paper, I present the case that tātparya is the most important component of an accurate paraphrase, and it must be retained in order to preserve the original intention of the work. In other words, tātparya should be the primary constraint of an acceptable paraphrase. As a side comment to my aim, I discuss the notion of why paraphrase only needs to be sufficiently similar to the original work. (shrink)

In Indian knowledge traditions, Vyākaraṇa describes the rules for the formation (prakṛti-pratyaya-vibhāga) and use of correct words (sādhuśabda). The Vākya (sentence) is postulated as the primary unit of communication. “śābdabodha” deals with the cognition of sentential meaning. Similarly, in Indian music, every rāga has a lexicon and grammar (rāga-lakṣaṇa): a rāga only allows some notes and not others, and it has rules for constructing phrases—notes to be highlighted, notes to end phrases on, ornamentation, etc. These phrases of the rāga are (...) comparable to “vākya” which when presented with due regard to certain other considerations generate an apprehension of the rāga (rāgabodha). During presentation of a rāga, an artist aims to evoke the rāga-cchāyā or rāga-svarūpa and also an emotive state in the listener. There is a cognitive aspect to the informed listening of a rāga that is parallel to linguistic communication. We seek to understand how these parallels work between śābdabodha and rāgabodha. We postulate that the conditions of expectancy (ākāṅkśā), logical consistency (yogyatā) and proximity (sannidhi) in combination with the theory of sphoṭa provide a framework to explain how a rāga is expounded and cognised. (shrink)

This paper questions a few assumptions of Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya’s theory of ordinary verbal cognition (laukika-śābdabodha). The meaning relation (vṛtti) is of two kinds: śakti (which gives us the primary referent of a word) and lakṣaṇā (which yields the secondary referent). For Gaṅgeśa, the ground (bīja) of lakṣaṇā is a sort of inexplicability (anupapatti) pertaining to the composition (anvaya) of word-meanings. In this connection, one notices that the case of lakṣaṇā is quite similar to that of one variety of postulation, namely, (...) śrutārtāthāpatti, where the subject hears only a part of a sentence and immediately grasps the words that are needed to render the sentential meaning complete. Unless he does that, sentential meaning, i.e., the composition (anvaya) of word-meanings shall suffer from the same inexplicability that characterizes instances of lakṣaṇā. In fact, in the ‘Śaktivāda’ section of Tattvacintāmaṇi, Gaṅgeśa himself draws a parallel between the cognition of sentential meaning in a śrutārthāpatti-like case and the cognition of sentential meaning in an instance of lakṣaṇā. However, Gaṇgesa himself treats Śrutārthāpatti as a piece of inferential cognition. If there is no fundamental difference between cases of śrutārthāpatti and cases of lakṣaṇā, then the cognition of sentential meaning in instances of lakṣaṇā must also be inferential in essence. In that case, we must admit, against Gaṅgeśa’s view, that such cognition of sentential meaning cannot be accommodated within the framework of verbal cognition (śābdabodha). Therefore, I conclude that some revision is needed in Gaṅgeśa’s theory of verbal cognition with respect to lakṣaṇā. (shrink)

Dr PurusQttama Bilimoria's book on sabdapramaIJa is an important one, and so is likely to arouse much controversy. I am pleased to be able to write a Foreword to this book, at a stage in my philosophical thinking when my own interests have been turning towards the thesis of sabdapramaIJa as the basis of Hindu religious and philosophical tradition. Dr Bilimoria offers many novel interpretations of classical Hindu theories about language, meaning, understanding and knowing. These interpretations draw upon the conceptual (...) resources of contemporary analytic and phenomenological philosophies, without sacrificing the authentIcity that can arise only out of philologically grounded scholarship. He raises many issues, and claims to have resolved some of them. Certainly, he advances the overall discussion, and this is the best one could hope for in writing on a topic to which the best minds of antiquity and modern times have applied themselves. In this Foreword, I wish to focus on one of the issues which I have raised on earlier occasions, and on which Dr Bilimoria has several important things to say. The issue is: is sabdabodha eo ipso a linguistic knowing, i. e., sabdapramll, or does Sabdabodha amount to knowing only when certain specifiable conditions are satisfied. It the second alternative be accepted, these additional conditions could not be the same as the familiar Ilsatti (contiguity), yogyata (semantic fitness), dka;,k~ll (expectancy) and tlltparya (intention), for these are, on the theory, conditions of sabdabodha itself. (shrink)