Indian Logic Part 03

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

Page 96

SPHOTA THEORY...
85
opponent. But now that the opponent is charging him with conceiving a situation where words are employed with no meaning coming in picture the latter decides to withdraw that plea. For now he argues as follows : “You are a strange Mimāṁsaka who does not know how words behave; for it is the very nature of words that they convey our information while this information is true or otherwise according as the speaker concerned is trustworthy or otherwise. 53 Thus even the sentence 'A hundred hords etc.' exhibits word-based 'association because it too conveys the information that such and such a thing seated at such and such a place acts in such and such a manner; that the information thus conveyed is objectively false is another matter. 54 Certainly, if this sentence did not exhibit even a word-based 'assocition' it would have been of the form of a senseless jumble of words”.55 This whole argument is of unique importance for having made two points, viz.
(1) All properly constituted sentence belongs to the same category insofar as it is a sentence, and in this respect it is to be contrasted with a senseless jumble of words.
(2) All sentence carries a meaning and so conveys an information, it being a secondary consideration that this information is true in the case of true sentences, false in the case of false ones. [In this connection noteworthy is the distinction explicitly made between a word-based 'association' and an object-based 'association'; a distinction corresponding to a distinction between 'grammatical ability' and 'physical ability'.) • Then Jayanta independently argues against the Prabhākarite view. while adding that the Kumārilite alternative too is not to his liking. 56 Really, Jayanta has endorsed the Kumārilite view as against the Prabhākarite, but his position has the merit of clearly recognising that the words of a sentence yield their own respective meanings as well as the meaning of this sentence, a recognition in connection with which the Kumārilite has some reservations. For officially the Kumārilite maintains that the instrument yielding sentential meaning are not words concerned but the word-meanings concerned. Of course, Kumārila himself has also somewhere said that the words of a sentence yield their own respective meanings as well as the meaning of this sentence just as fuel etc. jointly undertake the operation called cooking and severally the operations like burning