Page 146 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
than most Western theories because it includes injunc- tions. This theory may be expressed with the help of symbols that directly translate the basic MTmamsa concepts. Let sentences be expressed as functions with two functors, A (Skhyatatva, 'verbality') and L (lintva, 'optativeness'), for example:
L(A(k)), 'the knot (k) should be (L) tied (A).'
Now, if one expresses negation again by ~ , there are two possible negations:
~L(A(k)), 'the knot should not be tied' and:
L~(A(k)), 'the knot should be untied.'
The MTmamsa took another step and introduced the negation of terms, which the above formalism in fact suggests, but which is not used in Western logic (where the equivalent is expressed in the theory of classes by means of complementation):
L(A(~x)), 'the not-knot should be tied.'
This is interpreted as: 'another knot should be tied.' These types of negation were arrived at because of the existence of traditional injunctions such as ananu- yajesu yeyajamaham kuryat ('at the not-after-riteshe should say "Y e-Y ajamahe"') which is not interpreted as: 'at the after-rites he should not say "Ye-Yaja- mahe"' but as: 'at rites other than the after-rites he should say "Ye-Yajamahe".'
The correctness of the anvitabhidhana theory was also argued from learning theory. A child who hears his father use the sentences gamanaya and asvamanaya first understands the meanings of the entire expression from the context or situation: in the first instance, he sees someone go and return with a cow; in the second, with a horse. The child concludes that the two sen- tences mean: 'bring a cow' and 'bring a horse,' respec- tively. Then, by analysis of identity and difference or a substitution procedure, he arrives at the word meanings and concludes that gam means 'cow,' asvam 'horse,' and anaya 'bring.' Only later will he discover that endings such as -m are suffixes which express the relation of the words to each other. This process of analysis, called anvayavyatireka, was mentioned, probably for the first time, by Katyayana in a vartikka (Mah&bhasya 1.2.2) and was widely used by the gram- marians.
The MTmamsa made several other contributions to the theory of meaning. The Wittgensteinian slogan that the meaning of a word lies in its use was not only known much earlier in the West by Latin school- masters as verba valent usu, but also in India by the followers of the MTmamsa and other theorists who accepted the principle that radhi, the conventional meaning, established by usage, is stronger than yoga, the meaning arrived at by etymological derivation. Thus for example, dvirepha (etymologically 'two (avi)
r's (repha)') does not mean 'two r's' but 'bee.' (The reason is that another word for 'bee,' bhramara, has two r's.) The MTmamsa analysis went further by dis- tinguishing four classes of words:
(a) rQdha, 'conventional,' e.g., dvirepha
(b) yaugika, 'derivative,' e.g., pacaka 'cook' from
pac- 'to cook'
(c) yogaradha, 'both derivative and conventional';
e.g., pankaja 'anything that grows in mud' (panka), but also more specifically 'lotus' (which does grow in the mud)
(d) yaugikarQdha, 'either derivative or conven- tional,' e.g., asvagandha which can mean either 'smelling like a horse' (asva) or refer to a par- ticular plant (which does not smell like a horse).
3.2 Bhartrhari
Bhartrhari, a fifth-century philosopher from Kashmir, northwest India, influenced by Vedantic and Buddhist ideas, erected in his Vakyapadlya a metaphysical superstructure on the traditional semantics with which he was intimately familiar (he wrote a subcommentary on Patanjali's commentary on Panini). In this meta- physics, the principle of the universe is a 'language principle' (sabdatattva; sometimes translated as 'speech essence'), unchanging and without beginning or end. It introduces time, that is, past, present, and future,intotheworldofnamesandforms (namarupa)^
The principle of the universe may be grasped by a timeless, unitary flash of experience which Bhartrhari called pratibhS (intuition). But the meaning of a sen- tence is also grasped by pratibhS; in fact, it ispratibha. This doctrine reacts to the theory of sentence per- ception of Nyaya logicians and others, according to which the process of understanding follows the hear- ing of the sentence that is being uttered in time, from beginning to end; when the last word is perceived, the meaning is finally grasped. Bhartrhari's doctrine adds innate order and syntax to one's understanding and thereby changes the philosophic perspective: instead of a barren empiricism he offers an insight into the deep structure of language.
According to Mark Sideritis (1985:137), this theory 'would have us believe that the notion of word mean- ing is the product of a misleading analysis of linguistic phenomena,' which is counterintuitive and conflicts with the work of lexicographers. This is almost true. According to both Bhartrhari and the MTmamsa anvi- tabhidhana theory, word meaning is arrived at by abstraction and anvayavyatireka, that is, by com- paring forms that are partly identical and partly different—for example gamanaya (bring-the-cow) and asvamanaya (bring-the-horse); see above—but it is not therefore 'misleading.' From a historical point of view, these sentence-centered theories reflect the devel- opment of the Indian tradition of language analysis which started with the cutting up of the continuous
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