Jonardon Ganeri - Semantic Powers: Meaning and the Means of Knowing in Classical Indian Philosophy

The limit to the capacity of speech is as a means of knowing. If this limit is overstepped, there will be only disorder. Udayana

Words have powers, as do the people who understand them. A word has the power to stand in for, or take the place of, a thing. Vibrations in the air, or ink marks on paper, manage somehow to act as substitutes for people and places, planets and atoms, thoughts and feelings. It is to this extraordinary function that the Sanskrit term for 'meaning' calls attention: akti--the power or capacity of a word to stand for an object. People who understand words have powers as well; most remarkably, the capacity to acquire knowledge about people, places, planets, and so on, just by hearing noises or seeing marks. This too is a power, just as surely as is the power to see or remember or reason. It is the power to receive knowledge from the testimony of others. It is not all that surprising that these two powers, the semantic and the epistemic, should be connected, but it was the singular achievement of the Indian philosophers of language to analyse the nature of that connection in far greater depth than anyone had done before.

My book is an attempt to explicate and, in so far as I can, defend their analysis. Some years ago, I attended a series of lectures on Indian philosophy of language given by Bimal K. Matilal. Effortlessly moving between two very different philosophical idioms, Matilal revealed to an audience of mostly analytical philosophers the richness and sophistication of what, stressing the global nature of philosophical enquiry, he referred to as India's 'contribution to the study of language'. Shortly afterwards he agreed to read with me a work by the seventeenth-century Nyya philosopher Gaddhara, entitled aktivda ( 'Essay on Semantic Power'). For the next two and a half years we worked through the first half of this text, and he continued to teach me even during the long illness that eventually led to his death in 1991. The existence of this book owes a great deal to his encouragement, and its content, of course, to his writings. Another great Nyya scholar, Sibajiban Bhattacharyya,

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kindly agreed to see my study of the aktivda through to completion, and I spent several months in Calcutta reading portions of the text with him. I was lucky enough at that time to be able to attend P. K. Sen's Friday Group meetings, as well as P. K. Mukhopadhyay's classes on Nyya at the University of Jadavpur.

In the years it has taken me to complete the book, I have received much support from many other people whose assistance I am very happy to acknowledge. John Campbell, who bravely took over as my doctoral supervisor, read early drafts of some of the material, and guided me surely through to my viva in 1993. My father translated from Bengali many passages about Gaddhara's life, and transliterated texts from Bangla to Ngri. I received much valuable comment from two readers for Oxford University Press, the impact of which on the final text is considerable. Others, to whom I am also indebted include Eros Corazza, Aruna Handa, Shoryu Katsura, Julius Lipner, J. N. Mohanty, Paul Noordhof, Christopher Peacocke, Murali Ramachandran, C. Ram-Prasad, Mark Sainsbury, Richard Sorabji, Frits Staal, Heeraman Tiwari, and the audiences at various talks in which drafts of this material were presented. Special thanks go to Heather Price and Karabi Matilal. I would also like to express my gratitude to the University of London for awarding me a Jacobsen Fellowship ( 1993-5), to Wolfson College, Oxford, and to the philosophy editors at Oxford University Press. Finally, I wish to thank Kluwer Academic Publishers for permission to use material from three of my articles in the Journal of Indian Philosophy, "'Vydi and the Realist Theory of Meaning'" ( 1995), "'Meaning and Reference in Classical India'" ( 1996), and "'ka and Other Names'" ( 1996). The quotation above is from Udayana's discussion of reference failure in the