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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.
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]
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?
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Raja, K. Kunjunni, 1963, Indian Theories of Meaning (Series: The Adyar Library
Series 91), Madras: Adyar Library and Research Centre
Buy his new book here or his rst book here to keep him biding!
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