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D. D. Dayè
for legitimizing the thesis ( paksal ). The two exemplifications (sapaksa, and vipaksa-dřstānta?) of the warrant serve to satisfy : (1) the need for the loci or exemplification of the two necessary conditions of the three-fold trirūpa hetuo rule and, (2) the early Indian rhetorical tradition which has its historical roots in the Nyāya Sūtra. This tradition required the presence of (generally) “concrete" exemplifications, perhaps as a vestige of the earliest arguments by analogy. The drstānta", the sapaksa and vipaksa, and the great metalogical role they play in non-deductive mode of argumentation, leads one to suggest that the use of the term "drstānta"? is historically prior to "drstānta.”l
While my translations of paksal and hetul are not the more common ones, such as proposition/conclusion” and “reason” respectively, my translation of drstānta! as swarrant” is much more controversial and hence requires a more complex justification.
We shall now turn to a justification of the translation of drstāntal as “warrant". In the history of secondary scholarship about the Buddhist PA, "pstānta" has been usually translated as either "example" or "exemplification.” Emically, there are two metalogical types of drstānta(s): "concordant” (sādharmya) and "discordant" (vaidharmya). Sometimes, in the texts, the conditional "yat...tat" is referred to the word "drstänta" ; so sometimes the sapaksa and vipaksa exemplifications are meant, another equivocation.
Let us first dispose of two responses to my non-traditional translation of drstanta as "warrant," that it is neither a "standard" translation nor as etymological one. That is, “warrant” does not convey the metaphor of exemplification, as indicated in the etymology of dpstānta (vdrst, to see, to visually observe), the statement of the example in which the concomitant properties, or their joint absence, are illustrated.
To claim that one should translate etymologically, that "drstānta”] “means" example, illustration or exemplification, may be refuted by a counter-example concerning "paksa". If etymological translation is of primary importance in nyāya texts, then we should translate "pakşa” as "wing." Of course we should not do so, for the word "pakşa” has acquired a semi-technical meaning in nyāya kāda and a simple claim to translate in such a manner illustrates the methodological inappropriateness of trying to justify translating “drstānta"l solely on etymological grounds rather than on emic and etic logical grounds.
Since 1900, scholars have struggled with many difficult nyāya translation problems, but given the multiplicity of logics, syllogistics, propositional and predicate calculi, even the logic of relations, which have been used with and projected upon the PA, there is no more a “standard" translation than there is a standard source language logic. The comparisons and variations in the PA sources, in the target logics of formal translation and comparative metalogical interpretations, are the theoretical sources of the metalogical evidence for selecting a new translation of any PA term; it
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