Indian Logic Part 03

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

Page 48

PROBLEMS OF UNIVERSALS....
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general information it should be possible to fruitfully examine the contents of the present chapter, we take up its two parts one by one. (2) The Problem of Word-Meaning
Jayanta begins by saying that he proposes to answer those who would argue that there being nothing real a word might stand for a word has nothing to do with things real - in this connection first seeking to demonstrate as to what an individual word stands for and then as to what a sentence stands for.' Then taking up the case of individual words he divides them into those of the form of a verb and the rest, making the point that the former will be considered while discussing the problem of sentential meaning and the latter are to be further divided into four sub-classes, viz. common-nouns, verb-based nouns, adjectives, proper-nouns. Lastly it is said about a common-noun that it stands for a particular thing as possessed of an appropriate 'universal'? To this statement the Buddhist takes exception on the ground that a 'universal' is something fictitious. The stage is thus set for conducting controversy as to whether a ‘universal' is something real or something fictitious, a controversy which constitutes the kernel of what we are calling the first part of the present chapter. In order to appreciate the precise point of this controversy let us briefly review it in an independent fashion.
As in so many other cases, here was a controversy in which the rival. parties were right in rejecting what they were rejecting, wrong in accepting what they were accepting. Thus in essence the problem of 'universal' was the problem of identifying a thing as belonging to a class. Commonsense suggests that one identifies a thing as belonging to a class as a result of observing in this thing features that are characteristic of this class; a non-human living being learns from its own almost unaided experience how to select only such features and use them as an identification-mark, but in this very task a man can be considerably aided by a fellowman who might orally communicate to him as to what features are to act as an identification-mark in the case of a thing denoted by a particular word and hence belonging to a corresponding class. But this commonsense position was denied by the Buddhists on one ground and by their Nyāya and Mimāṁsā rivals on another. Thus the Buddhist argued that since whatever is real must be of the form of a unique-particular all attribution of a common set-of-features to a