A group blog of scholars exploring Indian philosophy
In her recent post on theories of sentence meaning in Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā, Elisa talked about a possible “contemporary Prābhākara” viewpoint about sentence meaning: …a contemporary Prābhākara might suggest that some preliminary understanding of word-meaning is immediately denoted by each word, Continue reading A contemporary Prābhākara contextualism
Words (for the Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā authors) get connected into a complex sentence meaning through proximity (sannidhi), semantic fitness (yogyatā) and syntactic expectancy (ākāṅkṣā). These three criteria correspond to the requirement of being uttered one after the other with no intervening Continue reading Proximity, semantic fitness and syntactic expectancy as criteria for the sentence meaning
One image I’ve encountered in Sanskrit texts on language is that of the arrow standing in for the capacity of words. I think the first time (in secondary literature) I saw this was in K.K. Raja’s Indian Theories of Meaning, Continue reading Words are arrows
Patrick O’Donnell, who also contributed to this blog, recently published an interesting response to the above argument, as found in this article by Gaston Dorren. Dorren’s main claim is: While all disciplines attract the occasional eccentric, it seems that two Continue reading “Linguistics in the premodern world? Just nonsense!”
Mīmāṃsakas of both the Bhāṭṭa and the Prābhākara subschools refute the idea of a sphoṭa carrying the meaning and being different from what we experience, namely phonemes and words, since this contradicts the principle of parsimony and our common experience. Continue reading Meanings of Words and Sentences in Mīmāṃsā
I am a big fan of Paul Ricoeur. It’s shame, I think, that he never learned Sanskrit, because he was deeply interested in a number of issues that were of critical importance to Indian thinkers: the production of meaning through Continue reading Hermeneutics, “Ricoeurian” and “Jaiminīya,” and the Question of Writing
According to the Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā approach to language, the sentence meaning is “something to be done” (kārya). In other words, unlike for Nyāya authors, sentences do not convey the existence of something, but rather that something should be done. Sentences Continue reading The Deontic Nature of Language
For a lucky coincidence, two long term projects of mine reached completion almost at the same time. You can therefore read on the 2017 issue of the Journal of World Philosophies the (Open Access) papers on philosophy of language which Continue reading Open access papers on philosophy of language etc.
According to Mīmāṃsā authors, and unlike Nyāya ones, Vedic sentences do not convey the existence of something, but rather that something should be done. This means that the entire Veda is an instrument of knowledge only as regards duties and Continue reading The Mīmāṃsā approach to the sentence meaning as something to be done
Spotted in Mysore, outside of the Jaganmohan palace, a philosophical sign, along the lines of those Alex Watson found in New Delhi: (I have been in Mysore the past several days after a week in Manipal at the Rasa Theory Continue reading Ākāṅkṣā in Mysore