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indian philosophy of language


Interview by Richard Marshall.

Malcolm Keating’s research is centred on Indian philosophy, in particular


Mīmāṃsā and other orthoprax Indian traditions. His focus is on the philosophy of
language and related topics such as epistemology and logic. He is concerned with
how hearers interpret non-literal speech acts, the epistemic status of testimony,
and the relationship between inferential and interpretive principles. His work
seeks to cross cultural and disciplinary boundaries, drawing on both Sanskrit and most recent
Anglophone philosophy, and engaging with philosophical, aesthetic, and
grammatical traditions in India. Here he discusses why philosophy of language is Interviews » The End Times »
Philosophy and Poetry
important, the ancient roots of linguistic philosophy, literal vs non-literal
Interviews » The End Times » The
meanings, artha, the importance of Sanskrit, how Indian philosophy deals with the Weaponising of Free Speech On
primary/secondary meaning distinction, three conditions necessitating secondary Campus, and Other Toxicities…
meaning, complications of bitextuality and polysemy, suggested meaning and Essays » Seven Theses
speaker’s intention, Buddhism and Jainism, whether Jainism is committed to a Essays » Why Is Trump Doing What
He Is Doing?
dialetheistic paraconsistent logic, Kashmiri Mukulabhaṭṭa, reading Indian and
Reviews » She Was Never Here
Chinese philosophy with an eye towards nding di erent questions, what Indian
Interviews » Scorpio Rising: Gothic
philosophy of language contributes to other philosophy of language, and why Hybridity and the Occult – A
a cross-disciplinary and historical and transcultural approach to philosophy is Discussion Between Laura Joyce and
important. James Pate
Essays » The Policeman’s Beard is
3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? Algorithmically Constructed
Interviews » The End Times »
Malcolm Keating: My undergraduate degree was in English and Spanish literature, Emptiness and No-Self: Nāgārjuna’s
Madhyamaka
but my interests, both literary and theoretical, skewed philosophical. I read a lot of
The End Times » How Not To Be A
Jorge Luis Borges (La biblioteca de Babel is still one of my favorite stories) and Frog In A Well:
literary criticism, but at that point didn’t think about studying philosophy, I think Chinese/German/Buddhist Philosophy
because I didn’t know philosophy of language was a thing. I envisioned Reviews » The Sacri ce Throw: SJ
Fowler’s The Wrestlers
philosophy as mostly ethics and metaphysics. I went on to do some training in
other languages, a bit of Greek and Hebrew, some studies in biblical literature, but
my questions kept being broader than the particularities of individual texts. I
wanted to know, to take an example, what a speech act was, why we would think buzzwords
of speech in this way, etc., and not simply how to apply something called “speech
act theory” to a speci c text. Eventually I got clued in to the existence of Taxidermy Tour: Behind the Scenes
and Private Collection
philosophers taking questions about language seriously. I read Wittgenstein’s
Doclisboa’ 18
Philosophical Investigations and while I don’t consider myself a Wittgensteinian,
From Hell – In Colour
it was through that book that I was introduced to philosophy of language. I
Glory Days
enrolled in a master’s degree at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, and from
The Events at the Bonner Hofgarten:
there, after taking a year to begin studying Sanskrit through some courses at the A Letter to a German Friend
University of Chicago, I began my work at the University of Texas at Austin to LIVEWIRE NYC JULY
study Sanskrit philosophy with Stephen Phillips. I’m fortunate, that my interests in Noumena: Initiation
pragmatics, especially in the context of Indian philosophy, allow me to read a lot Letter to the Author of the Letter to
the Father
of poetry and still think about ction, metaphor, and the relationship between
LIVEWIRE NYC JUNE
language and religious texts.
Pure Hollywood / Egress: She eld, 10
June
3:AM: You work in philosophy of language and for outsiders this may need
explaining. Why is philosophy of language important, why not leave it to
linguistics – and what are the questions you’re concerned with that require it?

MK: Well, I think philosophy of language is important for a whole range of


reasons that run from questions about what it is to be a human person to hot
political topics of the day. I can often motivate student interest in philosophy of
language by giving them examples of tweets and asking them questions. What did
the person mean by those 140 (now 280) characters? How do you know that’s
what they meant? What did that tweet accomplish? Give them a tweet with a
word that’s considered a slur, or by a person who has political power and says
something false or in ammatory, and other questions occur. How do we
determine the boundaries between what the person meant to say and do and what
the words accidentally triggered in you, the hearer? Is such a boundary
intelligible? What is the relevant context for interpreting what they meant and
what they said? How do we gure that out? And then there are the ethical and
metaphysical implications (I’m more open to ethics and metaphysics than I was as
an undergraduate). Is a speaker morally responsible for accidental e ects of their
speech, if it wasn’t intended? And, for that matter, what moral responsibilities are
there for the intentional e ects of speech?

Anyway, that’s one quick route to see why philosophy of language is important.
But if we can stick with Twitter for another moment, consider tweetbots, which
have come to play a large role in political discussion. And here I don’t just mean in
the US–I’m in Singapore and I’ve been seeing news about tweetbots with
relationship to upcoming Malaysian elections. A tweetbot is an algorithim which
generates expressions. They don’t just tweet out sentences, they also respond to
other tweets. Now, in the Western tradition of philosophy, a lot of early
philosophers distinguished between humans and animals or machines on the basis
of linguistic competence. Descartes does, for instance–he thinks that animals and
machines can’t learn languages. In the Indian context, it’s a bit di erent–Sanskritic
philosophers frequently talked about parrots “talking” as case studies which pose
di culties for our accounts of how testimony works, even though they do want
to make some distinctions between people and animals. In any case, whether
animals can learn languages or not (which depends on what we want to say a
language is), in the case of a tweetbot, a lot of people want to say that the bot
doesn’t really mean anything. That’s because to be able to mean something with
an expression requires having a mind with concepts that one expresses through
language. But while human beings may be the creatures on this planet with the
most sophisticated language capacities, it’s increasingly clear that we aren’t the
only ones that can use signs paired with signi ers to get other creatures to
understand and to do things. And so with the increasing sophistication of
algorithims to engage linguistically with us, we are forced to re ect on the
relationship between language and thought and language and being a human
person.

Those are fairly quick, but I think it gets at why philosophy of language is
important, in the broad sense of asking questions about how language works and
what language is. But you ask, as do a lot of people I encounter when I tell them
what I do, what is the relationship between philosophy of language and
linguistics. You ran an interview recently with Emma Borg, whose work I
admire, which pushed back a bit on that distinction. And I think I’d want to do
the same. A little while ago, two linguists came to visit our campus. When I
explained my work to them they both said, “Oh, you’re a linguist!” And if
disciplinary boundaries are determined in part by the papers you read and the
journals you publish in, there’s certainly overlap (I’ve published in the Journal of
Pragmatics, for instance). I can’t do what I do without knowing the work of Frits
Staal and Paul Kiparsky, both of whom work(ed) in linguistics as well as Sanskrit
and Indology. But even though in my forthcoming book I cite linguists and
appeal to distinctions found in linguistics literature, something I do di erently is
to engage with Indian philosophers. Many linguists I know might be looking at
Sanskrit texts as corpora. But I want to think alongside Bhartṛhari and Kumārila,
and it’s in the context of philosophers (and also people working in South Asian
Studies and Religious Studies) where I can do that.

3:AM: You’ve looked at the literal/non-literal distinction in Indian philosophy.


Who’d have thought linguistic philosophy was a thing back then! ‘Artha’ is a key
Sanskrit term isn’t it, and jnana. Can you begin by setting out what the question is
that we’re dealing with here, and what and when the relevant period of Indian
philosophy is? Who are the key philosophers and the three main textual traditions
involved in this?

MK: Who’d have thought, yes! It’s something which I wish more people would
think. The origins of modern Western linguistics begin with British colonials
“discovering” the generative grammar of Pāṇini (dating to 4th to 6th century
BCE). Given that, I think more of us (myself included, early on in my career)
should have thought it! Take linguist Larry Horn’s book, A Natural History of
Negation–he is aware of not just Pāṇini but Mīmāṃsā and Buddhist theories of
negation which are very sophisticated. We can’t be familiar with the intellectual
traditions of every culture (I’m certainly not), but given that some of our oldest
literature is in Sanskrit and that human beings have been speaking languages for a
very long time, I don’t think we should be that surprised that there would be
people re ecting on what language is and how it works, well before Russell and
Frege. And in the 1960s and the work of B.K. Matilal, English-language
philosophers have had resources to make them well aware that Indian philosophers
have been doing sophisticated stu in language (in Sanskrit, but not only that
language–there’s Pāli, Prakrit, Tamil, and other languages too). I should add that
Chinese philosophy also has a very long history of linguistic philosophy, dating
back to around the time of Pāṇini, and that anyone interested should look into
Mohist logic. I’m sure such re ections may be found in other contexts, but I can’t
speak to them.

[B.K. Matilal]

That said, there are a lot of questions in linguistic philosophy in Sanskrit texts (the
ones that I work with), but the questions that I am personally working on (in the
classical period, roughly 200 to 1300 CE) have to do with how people have
cognitions on the basis of speech. These cognitions are called śabda-bodha, and
Indian philosophers are concerned with how, when someone says “Bring the
book,” for instance, I have a cognition, or a mental event, which is of my need to
bring a book. Speaking broadly, Indian philosophy is concerned with commands,
requests, injunctions, as a theoretical starting point, and not so much assertions.
We learn language by hearing various di erent commands and successfully
ful lling them. (You might think of Wittgenstein’s “Slab!” here.) Over time, after
hearing “Bring the cow,” “Bring the horse,” “Feed the cow,” “Feed the horse,”
language-learners will come to pair words “bring,” “cow,” “feed,” “horse,” with
the appropriate objects in the world. This happens through a process of inference.
The objects in the world are artha, a term which has a wide semantic range
including “object,” “meaning,” and “aim.” Indian thinkers tend to be
referentialists, that is, they think the meaning of a word like “cow” is its referent,
which varies depending on the view (it could be a universal, a particular, or
something else.) This summary excludes various Buddhist theories which, in part
due to their metaphysics, tend to eschew this account. One big question, then, is
how do certain spoken combinations of words generate cognitions in hearers?
The answer has to do with what individual words mean, how they are combined
in context, and what a speaker’s intention is (on which more below).

The other term you mention, jñana, is often translated as “knowledge,” but as
Sanskritists have known for a while, and some recent work in experimental
philosophy based in Sanskrit-related languages has discovered, there can be false
jñāna. So it’s often best to translate that term as “cognition,” which in the context
of language is the result of someone’s utterance. When someone speaks truly, as in
assertion, or aptly, as in a command, then I come to have a genuine cognition.
Sanskrit philosophy of language is bound up with what contemporary philosophy
would consider epistemology and philosophy of mind. For example, among
thinkers known as Mīmāṃsakas, who belong to the “Mīmāṃsā” textual tradition,
injunctive sentences such as “The one who desires heaven should perform the
agnihotra ritual” are sources of knowledge, or epistemic instruments (pramāṇa-s).
They result in true cognitions, and these are cognitions which we cannot get any
other way, since we cannot observe heaven, and we can’t make inferences about it
(due to not being in a position to observe it). Now, Mīmāṃsā is a textual tradition
concerned with Vedic hermeneutics. Even at the early date of a philosopher like
Kumārila Bhaṭṭa (around 7th century CE), a lot of Vedic ritual traditions were lost.
So he is concerned to systematize interpretive practices around Vedic texts which
describe and command these rituals. He’s concerned with hermeneutics, but he’s
also concerned with epistemology, since these commands tell people how to act–
and moral imperatives aren’t derivable from observation or inference.

[Kumārila Bhaṭṭa]

But Mīmāṃsā is only one of many philosophical viewpoints (darśana-s) which


existed in ancient and classical India. There is Nyāya, or “Logic,” as well as
Vedānta, Buddhism, and a number of others. This is one “science” or śāstra, a
group of textual intellectual traditions, each of which self-consciously relates back
to a root aphoristic text. Another śāstra is grammar, or vyakāraṇa-śāstra, which
I’ve alluded to in the work of Pāṇini. (For formal semanticists who are interested
in what Sanskrit philosophy has to o er, they should take a look at grammar, for
instance Brendan Gillon’s paper, “Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī and Linguistic Theory,”
Journal of Indian Philosophy 2007, 35:445-468.) Finally, the other śāstra which
includes linguistic philosophy is one that not a lot of philosophers trained in the
analytic tradition are aware of, although I think that’s changing. It is known as
alaṃkāra-śāstra, or the science of guration. You might compare this to poetics
and aesthetics, since these thinkers are concerned with questions like what is a
metaphor, and what is the relationship of metaphorical meaning to ordinary
meaning? as well as how do hearers cognize aesthetic moods in literary works, and
what is the relationship between emotions and aesthetics? All three of these
sciences, or disciplines, have things to say about philosophy of language, and they
often draw on one another in innovative ways, such as in the work of the thinker
I wrote my dissertation on, Mukula Bhaṭṭa.

3:AM: How important is Sanskrit language in this work? I guess the religious
prominence of Sanskrit can’t lead to speci c philosophical commitments about its
referential capacities can it, given that Nāgārjuna uses it and Buddhists reject the
idea of a language having an inherent connection between it and reality?

MK: Sanskrit is important because it forms the primary basis of linguistic


re ection. To give a concrete example, an example of a “secondary” meaning
(something beyond the ordinary meaning) occurs in the Sanskrit sentence
chatrino yānti, which means “The umbrella-holders go.” This sentence is used in a
context when a single umbrella-holder is shading a royal person while a retinue
follows them. But because the word “umbrella-holder” is in the plural, thinkers
like Kumārila and Mukula argue that what is meant by it is not many people
holding umbrellas but a single umbrella-holder plus those associated with him.
The primary, we might say default, meaning would be the additive plural (many
umbrella holders) but in the right context, a secondary meaning of the associative
plural (one umbrella holder and their associates) is possible. In English, though, we
can’t get that second reading because we don’t have associative plurals, save for
pronouns like “we” and maybe some names. So some analysis is language-relative.

But as to broader, language-independent philosophical commitments, even


though Buddhists are late to using Sanskrit for philosophical re ection, beginning
with Pāli instead, thinkers like Nāgārjuna have competing views with brahminical
thinkers such as Mīmāṃsakas. And even further, within the brahiminical groups
(those who follow the Vedas) there is a lot of debate, so Sanskrit as a language, just
like any natural language, doesn’t entail a set of metaphysical commitments.
Likewise, Sanskrit speakers at that time were well aware of other languages and
language-speakers who are able to get around in the world. Some philosophers did
want to argue for the priority of Sanskrit, so that other languages only had
referential capacity in virtue of their being somehow related to Sanskrit, but that
position doesn’t win out. Sanskrit is also prominent religiously insofar as it’s part of
Vedic rituals, and correct interpretation and pronunciation of that language is very
important. This is a historical explanation, too, for some of the early sophistication
of linguistic re ection in the Sanskrit context. But I can’t emphasize enough that
Sanskrit isn’t the only language in which philosophical and literary re ection
occurs in India. Prakrit, Pāli, and Tamil should not be ignored, even though I
myself am not in a position to investigate these traditions in the original texts.

3:AM: How does Indian philosophy of language in general handle the Primary
and Secondary meaning distinction? Does Indian philosophy take all non-literal
meanings to be secondary? Can you say something about the di erent ways we
are to understand secondary meaning here?

MK: I think one di culty in this question is the ambiguity of what English-
speakers (let alone English-speaking philosophers) mean by “literal.” When I say
“All the beer is in the fridge, am I literally saying that all of the beer (in the entire
universe) is in the fridge? Or, with Kent Bach’s example, if I say “There’s beer in
the fridge,” and you open the door to see a puddle of beer on a shelf, but no cans,
does that mean my sentence was literally true? Suppose I say “It’s raining,” can that
sentence fail to be true literally speaking, since it is always raining somewhere and
I haven’t speci ed a time and place?

Because “literal” is a contentious term in analytic philosophy, I prefer to start with


the distinctions that Indian philosophers make and see what connections we might
be able to make later. The main distinction there is between primary (mukhya or
abhidhā) and secondary meaning, where the latter has a whole range of technical
terms (upacāra, gauṇavṛtti, lakṣaṇā, etc.) A simplest way to put things is in terms of
functions that result in cognitions. The primary function takes as its input a sound
(words) and results in a cognition of a referent. The secondary function takes that
cognition of a referent as its starting point and, under appropriate conditions,
yields another cognition with some semantic content, a di erent referent. So, for
instance, if I say “Ajay is a bulldozer,” the primary meanings which you cognize
due to the primary function include the person Ajay and the thing which is a
bulldozer, in a predication relationship. But since people aren’t actually bulldozers,
the secondary function takes bulldozer and results in your cognizing properties
that bulldozers have: they plough over things without stopping, they are
impervious to reason, etc. That example is what we might call a metaphor, but
consider this case: “The cow should be tied up.” Here, some Indian philosophers
(Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsakas following Kumārila) argue that nouns primarily refer to
universals like cowhood. Because of this semantic theory, the meaning that a
particular cow should be tied up counts as a secondary meaning. But that sentence
isn’t what we could consider a metaphor. So secondary meaning might be
considered a broad bucket into which pragmatic phenomena are put–things
which are near-side (sensitive to context but constrained by semantics) or far-side
(sensitive to context but optional and/or post-propositional).

Now, just with this one example, we can see that your theory of primary meaning
is going to impact your theory of secondary meaning. So we can’t speak of a
single Indian theory of secondary meaning. The Bhāṭṭa theory I’ve just described
is only a sketch of a general view–the details di er among thinkers–and it is
contested by Naiyāyikas, Prābhākaras, and grammarians like Bhartṛhari. And
when we get into very subtle linguistic cases–not ones like tying up cows, but
ones involving poetry–then thinkers in the Alaṅkāra tradition start making very
ne-grained distinctions involving the structure of comparison, the relationship
between background knowledge and connotations, and so on. This means that
Indian philosophy is in the same position as analytic philosophy, in that there’s no
answer to how it handles the literal/non-literal distinction in general (in the
analytic tradition, there are relevance theorists, Griceans, minimalists,
contextualists, speech act pluralists, etc).

3:AM: You say that all varieties of secondary meaning are necessitated by three
conditions: can you say something about what these are and how do they help
address the complications of bitextuality and polysemy?

MK: There are three conditions that Indian philosophers typically recognize as
individually necessary and together su cient for secondary meaning. Keep in
mind that we are still talking about śabdabodha, or cognitions that arise from
speech. So these are conditions that have to do with language comprehension.
They are

1..An incongruity or obstacle

2. A relationship between primary and secondary meaning

3.A warrant for the secondary meaning, usually a speaker’s motive

I can give you an example of how one Indian thinker analyzes these conditions.
Mukula Bhaṭṭa, who lived around the tenth century CE, argues that incongruity
can be a matter of a problem construing words as a sentence or a problem with the
sentence given what we know of the speaker. In fact, he thinks there are seven
factors involved in identifying incongruity: speaker, sentence, the expressed
meaning (like “what is said”), place, time, state, and individuality (what he means
by the last two isn’t completely clear, but has something to do with the nature of
things being referred to). All of these factors can be combined in various ways
(speaker and sentence together, speaker and place, etc.) So one incongruity
involving construing words in a sentence is exempli ed by “The village is on the
Ganges,” where if we take “Ganges” in its primary sense, which is for the river
Ganges, the village would be directly upon the river (and it would sink!). So we
understand “Ganges” to mean “bank of the Ganges” This is a recognizable case of
metonymy based on contiguity. But we could also take a sentence which works
perfectly well, and based on what we know about the speaker, understand it
ironically. Mukula’s examples involve poetry, but a simple one could be my
saying, “I hate masala dosa” when you know for a fact it’s one of my favorite
foods.

But in order to understand a secondary meaning from a primary there must be


some relationship between the two. In the case of the dosa, Mukula would say it’s
opposition–I mean the opposite, maybe something like “I love masala dosa” or “I
don’t hate masala dosa” (he isn’t speci c on this, and how irony works, and what
speakers are committed to is an important question). In the case of the bank of the
Ganges, he identi es the relationship as being one of contiguity, which is what I
expect modern linguists working on metonymy might say. He gives ve possible
major relationships, but some of them have sub-types. The crucial point is that we
aren’t understanding just anything from the primary meaning, but a second
meaning which is in some way accessible from the primary meaning.

Finally, there has to be a reason that the speaker is using the expression in this
way. At least for Mukula, he is concerned with people having intentions, but in
other philosophical contexts, thinkers consider speech acts which lack speakers
(written texts or an oral tradition taken to have no origin). Mukula identi es two
motives: speaking in a conventional way or speaking in a novel manner. The
latter explains things like poetry, although I take him to mean any kind of unusual
new use of language. Conventional expressions are what we might call “dead
metaphors,” things which we don’t actively think of as having a secondary
meaning, but which, on re ection, we can see that they originated from an earlier
primary use. Even “back then,” in the 8th century CE when Mukula is writing,
people were aware of linguistic shift, and the di culty in pinning down the
etymology of an expression.

You mention “bitextuality” and “polysemy.” The rst is a term of art due to Yigal
Bronner in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. He works on Sanskrit poetics and has coined this term for the Sanskrit
term śleṣa, which often gets translated as “punning.” The problem with “punning”
as a translation is that in English, save for some very rare cases (like James Joyce),
puns are silly. But in Sanskrit, there was a tradition of writing poetry with
multiple registers of meaning which often resulted in a further metaphorical
meaning. There’s a poem which, read one direction, narrates the story of the
Mahābhārata, and the reverse, the Rāmayāṇa. Sanskrit is able to do some
sophisticated things because the writing system retains phonetic changes at word
boundaries. So while in English, when we speak we might drop the “g” when a
word ends in “-ing,” thought we typically wouldn’t record that in writing. But
Sanskrit has a sophisticated set of rules for phonetic changes, and many of these
changes are many-to-one. That is, a written ā could be disambiguated as a+a,  ā+a,
a+ā, or  ā+ā. Between these changes (called sandhi) and individual word types
having multiple meanings (polysemy), a single stanza can have multiple readings.

One problem for Sanskrit thinkers, which Bronner points out, is which reading is
“ rst,” and what it is that prompts our awareness that there is a second, third, or
further reading. Sometimes there can be subtle cues in the poem, but it isn’t as
obvious as a case like “Ajay is a bulldozer” where a reading is clearly false. After all,
we need to have two simultaneously acceptable meanings. My own work hasn’t
focused on bitextuality in great detail, although I think it’s fascinating. It requires a
high level of sophistication in Sanskrit as well as a knowledge of Sanskrit poetry.
Hopefully, though, more philosophers will come along with these skills who are
interested in joining up with Sanskritists and South Asianists on these topics.

[ Ānandavardhana ]

3:AM: What were the main issues for Indian philosophers regarding suggested
meaning and speaker’s intention?

MK: “Suggested meaning” is a common translation of the term dhvani, which


originally referred to the reverberating resonance of a drum or musical
instrument. The idea of suggestion due to Ānandavardhana, ca 9th century CE, is
that words have a reverberation of meaning which is not due to the primary or the
secondary meaning. I’m not sure therer’s a neat comparison to analytic philosophy
here. We might think of “connotation” but Ānandavardhana has a very broad
phenomenon in mind, which arises from phonemes, words, compounds,
sentences, and entire discourse units. He’s clear that it’s a kind of meaning (artha)
but later thinkers like Abhinavagupta take it in a more aestheticized and emotive
direction. In any case, Ānandavardhana thinks that there is a kind of meaning and
kind of meaning function beyond primary and secondary. He thinks everyone
admits this phenomenon exists but he’s the rst to identify that something else
should be posited as a linguistic capacity, or function.

Take the sentence, “Pārvatī counted the petals on the lotus in her hand.” This is
from a poem, in which Pārvatī, a beautiful goddess (the favorite examples of these
philosophers tend to be love poetry) is hearing about her bethrothal to Śiva, a
handsome and powerful god. Instead of looking at the messenger, she looks at a
ower in her hand. Ānandavardhana says that this sentence (part of a longer verse)
suggests that Pārvatī is shy, and by that it suggests that she is in love. Now, he
argues, this is certainly not expressed by the primary meaning of the sentence.
Nor is there any obstacle which prevents us from understanding the sentence and
forces a gurative meaning. This is just a description. But the whole point is to
suggest, connote, etc., that Pārvatī is in love. In fact, he says, that’s the intention of
the poet–any other aspects of the verse which are expressed are subsidiary to this
goal, which is to convey that Pārvatī is in love.

This view, that poetry’s main purpose is to suggest meanings, and to suggest
meanings like being in love (which is a rasa, or an aesthetic “ avor,” “taste”) comes
to dominate Sanskrit poetic theory. But before that happens around the 12th
century CE, several philosophers argue that we can give an account of suggestion
in terms of ordinary things like inference or the secondary function. The thinker
Mukula I mentioned earlier, might explain the incongruity in this verse in a very
broad sense: it is incongruous with being in love that one doesn’t pay attention to
news about one’s beloved. But we know, as a matter of our background
knowledge, that Pārvatī should be in love with Śiva. So we resolve the
incongruity by understanding her apparent distraction as shyness. To
contemporary philosophers of language, this might sound like inference to the
best explanation (IBE), which is often given as an account of how pragmatic
inferences work. However, despite my having said something similar in
previously published work, I don’t think Mukula’s analysis is quite like this. I now
think he nds the inferences in poetry to be much stronger than IBE. It’s more
determinate, and is closer to inference to the only explanation (as Elisa Freschi and
Nirmalya Guha have both said in rejoinders to my work). However, I do still
think that Mukula is explaining what appears to be suggestion as a kind of
inferential reasoning known as arthāpatti, often translated as “presumption,” or
“postulation.” It’s just that postulation isn’t identical with IBE. I hope, in a
forthcoming edited volume of translations and essays on arthāpatti, to get a bit
clearer on just what it is–it’s crucially implicated in linguistic interpretation for
many Indian philosophers.

[Dharmakīrti]

3:AM: Buddhism and Jainism reject the primary secondary meaning distinction.
What are the reasons for this? Is it because of their metaphysical commitments?

MK: Buddhism and Jainism are both traditions which reject the cultural and
philosophical dominance of the Vedas. As with any other -ism, in Indian
philosophy and elsewhere, we want to be careful to look at individual thinkers and
texts and not make too quick generalizations. It’s okay to talk about what
“empiricists” think to rst-year undergraduates, maybe, but very soon we want to
get to speci cs. So with that caveat in mind, we can say roughly that Buddhism
has a kind of error theory about our ordinary experiences of and talk about the
world. That error theory varies a lot from thinker to thinker, but it means that
when I use words like “I” and believe I’m referring to a enduring entity, I am
mistaken. There is actually a lot of work that can be done in relationship to
Buddhist philosophy of language, especially in the realm of what modern
philosophers call “pragmatics.” Roy Tzohar has recently published a book with
OUP on one Buddhist theory of metaphor, showing that Buddhists are drawing
on the brahminical concepts, but using them to undermine metaphysically realist
assumptions.

When I say they deny the primary-secondary distinction, what I mean is they
reject the picture on which the primary meaning is the referent in the world, and
the secondary meaning is a di erent referent which is understood because of
reference failure (“Ajay is a bulldozer”) or some other problem. How the details of
linguistic understanding work out, though, is a really di cult topic. A further
fascinating aspect of Buddhist philosophy of language and “pragmatics” is that
Dharmakīrti’s work (he is an important Buddhist philosopher) is in uential for
Ānandavardhana who I mentioned earlier in relationship to suggestion as well as
critics of Ānandavardhana, such as Mahima Bhaṭṭa.

As for Jainism, that’s an even more, dare I say, underdeveloped area needing
contemporary work. Apparently Jainas did a lot of work in poetics, but much of it
remains untranslated and I haven’t had the time to investigate it carefully.
However, Peter Flügel has done some work in this area, and he argues that Jainas
have some normative principles about how people should speak which are
analogous to Gricean maxims. However, These are not maxims which, when
outed lead to implicatures–rather they are conversational norms with ethical
weight, since outing them leads to harm. I expect that, going back to the
political implications of speech, there is much to be learned from looking at
Buddhist and Jaina considerations of speech from an ethical standpoint.

3:AM: Is Grahame Priest right to argue that Jainism is committed to a dialetheistic


paraconsistent logic because of their re ections of language and their seven-fold
schema?

MK: I am not an expert on Jainism and can’t take a strong position on this
question. The only thing I’d say is that I’ve read di ering views on this question,
for instance, in the work of Piotr Balcerowicz and Jonardon Ganeri. My own
methodology has evolved to be reticent about claiming any particular thinker (let
alone an entire tradition, since “Jainism” is made up of individual thinkers) is
committed to a view found in another philosophical context such as China or
Europe. I would be surprised if connections weren’t found between di erent
contexts, but I’d also be surprised if those contexts didn’t have signi cant
di erences in starting assumptions, etc.

3:AM: You’ve written about lakṣaṇā in the work of ninth-century Kashmiri


Mukulabhaṭṭa in terms of the question: how do we use words to mean something
else but not everything else. Can you sketch for us  Mukulabhaṭṭa’s account and
why you nd his approach so interesting?

MK: I’ve already talked a lor about Mukula above–I’m working on nishing my
book on him, so it’s hard not to! The term lakṣaṇā in his context means
“indication” or just a broad catch-all for everything from metonymy to irony to
metaphor to punning (or bitextuality). What I found exciting about him when I
rst discovered his work in graduate school is that he is not a Naiyāyika or a
Buddhist or a Mīmāṃsaka, but he a thinker drawing on a range of conceptual
resources in order to argue for a view he found plausible.

I think a lot of philosophers have this picture of Indian philosophy as being a


matter of “schools,” where one being a “Nyāya philosopher” means they are going
to necessarily be committed to x, y, and z. Not only is that incorrect (there’s a lot
of disagreement within “schools” and borrowing across them), but these
individuals are thinkers in pursuit of the truth. They may have genre conventions
which they are adhering to (as do we–ask anyone trying to publish in a journal)
but that they are writing in a commentarial style doesn’t entail that they are
merely writing footnotes on someone else’s work And while the “schools” do have
basic starting assumptions, there’s a lot of creativity in working with what those
entail.

So Mukula is someone who draws on grammarians like Pāṇini, Patañjali,


Bhartṛhari, as well as Mīmāṃsā philosophers such as Śabara, Bhartṛmitra,
Kumārila, and Prabhākara, and also poetic theorists like Udbhaṭa and
Ānandavardhana. He’s an interdisciplinary thinker who has a poetic ear but is
committed to the position that poetry must be intelligible as a human activity, like
other cases of language. I found that compelling, and so I decided to work on his
text. I was fortunate to have been preceeded in this by Lawrence McCrea at
Cornell, who has shown Mukula’s importance historically for Sanskrit poetics and
philosophy. In my own work, I’ve tried to show his broad philosophical
importance. He identi es contextual features which in uence the meanings of
expressions, he proposes a novel theory of sentence meaning, and he tries to give a
complete account of communication from word meaning, to sentence meaning,
to poetic connotations. It’s a short, schematic work, but its creative reuse of earlier
thinkers to resolve a new problem (what to do with Ānandavardhana’s theory of
suggestion?) is fascinating.

3:AM: So in current philosophy language cognitivists and non-cognitivists


disagree about whether metaphoric language have additional meanings to the
literal one. Would this contemporary debate gain from awareness of distinctions
and arguments found in classical Indian philosophy?

MK: The rst thing I would say is that when I go to Indian philosophers with my
own pre-conceived notions of what questions are important, I often come away
disappointed or confused. For that reason, I’ve learned to read Indian philosophy–
as well as other philosophical traditions like those found in China–with an eye
towards nding di erent questions. Let me put this another way. If I go to
Kumārila, whose discussion of secondary meaning in the Tantravārttika is hugely
in uential in Sanskrit philosophy, and I hope he will tell me whether metaphor is
a matter of compositional semantics or psychology and action (as Lepore and
Stone put it in their 2010 “Against Metaphorical Meaning”) I will be frustrated
because there is not such a neat divide in Indian philosophy. Compositional
semantics informs the Bhāṭṭa theory of sentence meaning, which Kumārila
espouses, but it is also intimately bound up with psychology and action, since
utterances prompt cognitions in an agent, and are grounded in their ability to
prompt actions.

Apart from that, I think one of the fruitful aspects of looking into Indian
philosophy of language–by which I want to include the sciences of grammar,
philosophy, and poetic theory–is that they make a range of ne-grained
distinctions among pragmatic phenomena. Often when talking about metaphor in
the Western context, we start with expressions of the form, “x is y,” but this is
only one grammatical expression of identi cation in Sanskrit. If philosophers are
concerned with something they call “metaphor” that transcends natural languages,
although it may have di erent manifestations within di erent such languages, it’s
worth looking at a range of examples. So collecting examples of what Sanskrit
thinkers considered “metaphorical” or “ gurative” might help our thinking. That’s
essentially a point about data collection.

But beyond that, we can see that Indian theorists looking at pragmatics made a
range of distinctions we might want to consider. Suppose we take our “x is y”
example again. We can identify x with y (“x is y”) but we can also compare (“x is
like y”). That’s familiar. But in Sanskrit theory, there is recollection (“x reminds
me of y”), inversion (“x is more important than y”), doubt (“is that an x? is it a y?”),
representation (saying to x “y!”), and so on. It may be that these distinctions
reduce to identi cation or comparison, but it’s worth stopping to inquire how,
and why other thinkers might have made these distinctions.

3:AM: Does the argument about whether only sentences communicate quali ed
sentences that you nd in the seventeenth century Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā work, the
Mānameyodaya and three commentaries on the Śabdapariccheda in Kumārila
Bhaṭṭa’s Ślokavārttika add new insights to contemporary debates in philosophy of
language?

 MK: The debate you’re referring to is whether when someone says “ re!” hearers
somehow understand a complete sentence, like “There is a re!” or whether the
single word can communicate an assertion. This debate in philosophy of language
and linguistics is often characterized as the debate over subsentential ellipsis or
discourse-initial ellipsis. In Kumārila’s text and commentaries, the discussion is
over how two di erent cases are understood. One case is a question-and-answer
conversation. One person asks, “Who is going?” and the second replies “the king.”
Here, it seems like some linguistic material from the question is somehow
imparted to the reply, so that “the king” expresses “The king is going.” The other
case is the expression “door, door,” which is used when someone wants to ask or
command that a door be closed. Here there is no other discourse material that we
can draw from, and so there’s a question as to whether these two cases are
di erent, and how they should be analyzed.

Two commentators (Sucarita Miśra and Pārthasārathi Miśra) on Kumārila, who


brings up this issue give what seem to be di erent answers. The rst seems to
appeal to inference where there is a conditional, like “in all cases, if there is a noun,
there must be a corresponding verb.” The second seems to appeal to postulation,
discussed earlier, which doesn’t require a conditional, but merely the resolution of
some incongruity. Historically, the Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsākas side with the second view,
as we can see in the 17th century work you mention, but how they get there is an
important question (and one which I’ve just scratched the surface of).
Philosophically, it seems as if the rst option is unsatisfactory–our conditional
would need to be unrealistically precise, to account for each case, or it would
underdetermine the solution (“close” or “shut” seem equally ne). But since
postulation also seems to requires a unique solution, it is not immediately superior,
even though no universal claim must be made.

This debate anticipates in a lot of ways the debate between Robert Stainton, Jason
Stanley, Jason Merchant in the early 2000s over whether single word utterances
can constitute assertions. Whether the Mīmāṃsā debate has something speci c to
contribute, I don’t know quite yet. I’ve written one paper in which I’ve looked
carefully at a few important texts. But that’s a distance from drawing the kinds of
connections necessary for Indian philosophy to intervene in contemporary
debates. I’d rather take my time than attribute cool views to Indian thinkers which
are really my own confabulations.

3:AM: Overall then, what are the main implications of the secondary primary
distinction in Indian philosophy and does awareness of the way these philosophers
deal with these issues provide us with new resources for philosophizing these
issues that are not found in non-Indian philosophy?

MK: I think I’ve explained the implications of the primary/secondary distinction at


length, but the takeaway that’s important is that there’s not just one such
distinction, as its details depend on the commitments of the thinker in question
(Kumārila versus Bhartṛhari versus Śālikanātha etc.).

As for resources, I get a bit uncomfortable with this line of questioning. It puts
Indian philosophy in a double-bind, since if its resources are too far a eld from
Anglophone philosophy, it’s alien, and it doesn’t answer the right questions. On
the other hand, if we nd the same or very similar distinctions, then why bother
reading Kumārila instead of Russell? I think that at one level, reading Indian
philosophy, Chinese philosophy, Aztec philosophy–any philosophy which is not
one’s own default context–is a good check for temporal and cultural hubris. I
doubt that there is a grand march forward in philosophical progress (the range of
knowledge of premodern Sanskrit thinkers puts me to shame) and I am skeptical
that I’ve been born into the culture which has managed to wind up with the most
truths.

I think it’s very possible that philosophers reading Indian thinkers with an open
mind and willingness to shift perspectives will nd resources for their own
questions, or even new question that are more compelling. But I think that the
resources are found not only in the conceptual distinctions but also in the
epistemic approach to reading philosophy broadly.

3:AM: It struck me that there was a connection between Yablo’s recent work on
‘Aboutness’ and Kashmiri Mukulabhaṭṭa’s model of lakṣaṇā. You link it with
contemporary linguist James Pustejovsky’s work. As a take home can you
summarise why you think philosophy of language is important, especially in the
face of criticism of philosophy generally and why your cross-disciplinary and
historical and transcultural approach is important?

MK: I can see the connections you might make with Aboutness, since Mukula is
concerned with how we might talk about the Ganges river in a few di erent ways
with the same sentence type. By saying, “The village is on the Ganges,” I can be
talking about its location close to the Ganges and distant from the Vitastā, I can be
talking about its location close to the bank of the Ganges, and I can be talking
about its being a very holy village, since it’s close to the holy Ganges. In my 2013
paper, I drew connections with Pustejovsky’s conception of sort-shifting, because
I thought it as a good way to get at how Mukula’s system of relationships allowed
for simultaneous constraints and creativity in polysemous expressions.

I think that, as you put it, a “cross-disciplinary and historical and transcultural
approach” is important because of who we are as people. I’m skeptical that
historically contingent disciplinary boundaries should respected as arbiters of what
counts as important questions, so I want to talk to people who are not just in
philosophy departments. I think that what you might call “temporal hubris” is
dangerous, and reading what’s been written just in the last twenty to one hundred
years is relatively myopic, given the length of human history. Ceteris paribis for
cultural considerations. Why would I, as a philosopher of language, close myself
o from other languages, other times, being studied in di erent ways?

3:AM: And for the readers here at 3:AM, are there ve books you could suggest
we all read to take us further into your philosophical world?

MK: The rst four are secondary literature on Indian philosophy, and the fth is a
translation of an important Sanskrit text and commentary. I want to encourage
people to read primary texts and not just what has been written about Indian
thought.

Matilal, Bimal Krishna, 1971, Epistemology, Logic, and Grammar in Indian


Philosophical Analysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press. New edition in 2005,
Jonardon Ganeri (ed.).

McCrea, Lawrence, 2008, The Teleology of Poetics in Medieval Kashmir,


Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Raja, K. Kunjunni, 1963, Indian Theories of Meaning (Series: The Adyar Library
Series 91), Madras: Adyar Library and Research Centre

Siderits, Mark, 1991, Indian Philosophy of Language, Dordrecht: Kluwer


Academic Publishers.

Ānandavardhana, The Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavardhana with the Locana of


Abhinavagupta, Daniel H.H. Ingalls (trans.), Number 49 in Harvard Oriental
Series, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Richard Marshall is still biding his time.

Buy his new book here or his rst book here to keep him biding!

End Times Series: the rst 302

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First published in 3:AM Magazine: Thursday, May 31st, 2018.

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