Indian Logic Forum

Plamen

A year ago I happened to post a message to a thread called Logical Terms at a Philosophy Forum, one of the best on the Net. Didn't expect much reaction, in fact didn't expect any reaction. There was, however, a reaction - quite sympthomatic for the level of a primary confrontation with the culture of the Indian logic. Here is the post and the answers to it.

I would also add some basic Indian logical terms used in The Moon-Light of Logic:

anumana - inference
anumiti - inferential knowledge
svarthanumana - inference for one's own sake (it can be two or three membered)
pararthanumana - inference for the others' sake (requiring five-membered syllogism)
avayavin - full-fletched syllogism
avayava - member of syllogism
- 1. pratijna - assertion, or thesis
- 2. hetu - see below, an expression in the fifth case (Ablative), pointing to the reason
- 3. udaharana - example, illustration
- 4. upanaya - application
- 5. nigamana - conclusion
sadhya - probandum
sadhana - probans
vyapti - logical pervasion
- anvaya - invariable concomitance
- vyatireka - exclusion
hence the syllogisms being three:
- anvayi (modus ponens)
- vyatireki (modus tollens)
- anvaya-vyatireki (combined)
paksa - subject = locus
paksadharmata - the property of sadhya to pertain to paksa
hetu - reason, argument (the same as sadhana)
hetvabhasa - argumental seemingness (fallacy)
- anaikantika - indefinite, pointing to many alternatives
- - sadharana - too general
- - asadharana - too specific
- - anupasamharin - inconclusive
- viruddha - contradicted, contradictory
- satpratipaksa - contralocal (hetu is pointing to a locus demonstrating the absense of probandum)
- asiddha - untenable
- - asrayasiddha - with regard to substratum
- - svarupasiddha - with regard to its own form (immanently untenable)
- - vyapyatvasiddha - with regard to the pervadedness, a ground which exposes the absence of the delimitor (avacchedaka) of pervadedness (vyapyatva).
- badhita - disproved
upadhi - condition is what does not pervade the probans, while pervading the probandum (say, the wett fuel is coextensive with the smoke-producing fire, but is not to be found in the smoke).

* * *
Moderator's comments:
[blue]Splitting this because for the most -- if not, the whole -- part it's just a translation of some of the terms there. Any questions, feel free PM me.
~dreamweaver[/blue]

Gassendi1:
What are we supposed to infer from the fact that there are a few terms that show that there is some logical thought in the East? Not that Eastern logic is anywhere near as developed a discipline in the East as it is in the West. That would be preposterous.

Nonblack Raven:
Well, there are still some questions that I would find interesting to ask:

How does tradional Indian logic compare with earlier versions of Western logic, such as Hellenistic and medieval logic?

Does traditional Indian logic offer any insight into any problems of logic, or offer problems not considered in Western logic? (For example, some Hellenistic logic was more interested in the problems of possibility and necessity that have only been fully revived as a major topic of logic reletively recently)

Does the 5 part syllogism of Indian logic hold any advantages? I have read of it, it seemed interesting, but I did not immediately discern and powerful advantages.

In short, Plamen, any brief introduction for us as to what the system gets us we don't already have, or how it compares?

Gassendi1:
Or, indeed, whether there is any comparison. For instance, whether there is an Indian version of Principia Mathematica.

Nonblack Raven:
This seems to me a reasonable question, but not the only question that is relevant.

Let us take the general question of the value of philosophy before say 1600. It seems to me an historicaly interesting question whether Indian philosophy before this date, whatever its faults compared to later philosophy, raised more or less philosophically interesting questions than western philosophy.

Second, older philosophy (western or eastern) may be inferior overall to more recent philosophy, but the question of whether they said anything of interest today is still relevant.

The fact that answer A is the best available does not mean that answer B has nothing whatsoever to offer. Answer A would only have this superiority over answer B if answer A is completely and totally right, which few people would say of any answer with respect to philsophy.

Remember the question is not whether the best of western logic is superior in some respect to the best of eastern logic, the question, at least for me, is does eastern logic offer us anything all worth paying attention to.

mixol:
mish-mash, informal logic, mish-mash, formal logic, mish-mash, potatoes,... so many ideas melded into a single amorphous blob.

Plamen · Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2005 3:48 pm Post subject:

My answer ran:

Thank you for this quite unexpected interest in Indian logic. It is almost more than a decade that I am not engaged in academic studies in this field, but when I started getting interested in it, the first thing I asked myself was, are you qualified enough to compare European and Indian logic. The answer was No, so my first task was to learn some fundamental Sanskrit in order to read Indian logical works in the original. The Moon-Light of Logic was the published outcome of this line of my studies. The book contains the Sanskrit text of Tarka-kaumudi, English translation and my commentaries on the nature of Indian logic, even attempts to formalize the basic modes of it. Stahl, however, did it better, so I would refer you to his books and articles.

I was convinced that the nature of Indian logic is not in its formal character, that's why formalization is a marginal and quite useless exercise; the nature of Indian logic should be exposed rather by geometric means because it lays bare the architectonics of all material a priori regularities of mind, as opposed to the formal syntetic a priori judgements of Kant. This is the method applied by the Navya-Nyaya, and I would suggest getting acquanted with the Visayata-vada (theory of objectivity) exemplary booklet of Prof. V.N. Jha from the CASS, Pune University.

Indian Logic is a vast field for investigation, almost incomprehensible, and surely not within the reach of a single student. Only the first volume of the 1973 edition of Tattvacintamani of Gangesopadhyaya (Pratyaksa-khanda) contains 923 pages (multiply by 3 to get the volume in English) of most complicate and professionally designed logical constructions. Just looking at the shelves of logical manuscripts in Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute would prompt one to the subversive idea that having Aristotle as antecedent is not enough for a logic to be called logic.

European logic came to the ideas of Indian logic only with the rise of transcendental phenomenology of Husserl. And this is not a superficial observation. I have tried (probably with moderate success) to substantiate it in a book called Phenomenology and Indian Epistemology (which is still available in Amazon.com).

Anyone interested in the nature of vyapti - which is central to the new school of Indian logic (see the list above) - is invited to have a look at the book of Dr. Toshihiro Wada, Invariable Concomitance in Navya-Nyaya (Delhi: 1990, XII, 535 p.).

Plamen · Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2005 3:59 pm Post subject:

Some concluding comments:

Gassendi1: