Indian Logic Part 03

Author(s): Nagin J Shah
Publisher: Sanskrit Sanskriti Granthmala

Page 15

INDIAN LOGIC
wrong in asserting what he does, right in denying what the Mimārsaka asserts. Jayanta concludes the present phase of his enquiry by arguing that the same God who created the world also composed Vedas because the composition of Vedas requires a knowledge of all the world and all the beings inhabiting this world, 14 also by arguing that the same God who composed one Veda composed all the four because the four Vedas teach interconnected things." By now Jayanta has already discussed the specific problem of the present section. viz. whether Vedas are. an authorless composition or a composition by God. But he yet discusses two allied problems, viz. (1) whether word-meaning relationship is eternal or one established by God, (2) how the Naiyāyika and the Mimārsaka respectively vindicate the validity of Vedic testimony.
Thus the Mimāṁsaka argues that a word possesses an inherent capacity to yield the meaning it does and yet one must learn this meaning from his elders just as smoke possesses the inherent capacity to act as probans for inferring fire and yet one must learn about this capacity somehow or other. 16 This way he repudiates the alternative that the relation between a word and its meaning is established through a convention set up somehow; his point is that it is inconceivable as to who and when will set up such a convention (not, for example, God at the time of world-creation - all which is an unwarranted hypothesis), also that in that case a word would be reduced to the status of certain bodily gestures, physical arrangements etc. that might conventionally be assigned some meaning by somebody.!7 The objection that on the present supposition the same word should not mean two things in two languages is rejected on the ground that all word is capable of yielding all meaning - alternatively on the ground that a word possesses that meaning which is assigned to it by the Aryans in contrast to the Mlecchas.18 All these positions maintained by the Mimārsaka Jayanta assails one by one. Thus on the latter's showing there obtains between smoke and fire a natural - objective - relation inasmuch as the former is produced by the latter, but there obtains just a conventional - cognitive - relation between a word and its meaning, for if the latter too were a natural relation then so soon as a word is heard its meaning should be cognised just as so soon as fire is properly set up smoke is produced. The objection that if word-meaning relationship is merely conventional