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INDIAN PHILOSOPHY
Akalanka accepts this,23 but he criticises Dharmakīrti's view that internal qualities could never be inferred legitimately from overt behviour. A well-examined overt behaviour would always enable us to infer its cause, viz., the internal quality. It is a rule that a wellscrutinised effect would never frustrate our efforts to infer its proper cause 24
Of course, votaries of every system regard the scriptures of their faith as valid on the ground that they are not composed by persons smitten with narrow love and selfishness. The Mīmārsakas consider the Vedas as authorless and thus above the possibility of composition by a person with defects.25 The Nyāya-Vaiseșikas maintain that they are composed by God who knows things as they are and is beyond attachment and hatred. The Jainas and Buddhists consider their scriptures to be the words of their masters who have freed themselves from the clutches of internal enemies and, as a result, developed transcendental vision.
Now, let us consider, the point whether the knowledge derived through testimony is inferential. The Nyāya logicians hold that words are directly connected with things, though this connection with things is conventional or arbitrary. But that does not mean that words do not generate knowledge of things in those who have learnt the convention. They do generate the knowledge of things in persons acquainted with convention.26 But they do not generate valid knowledge. In other words, they are not responsible for the generation of vaildity or invalidity in the knowledge. Validity and invalidity depend on guna and dosa respectively. Here in the present context, authoritativeness or otherwise of the speaker constitutes, respectively, the guna and dosa of the cause of the knowledge.27 Thus, the attitude of the Nyāya logicians is that as soon as we understand the meaning of a sentence, we acquire the knowledge of things and if it is a sentence of an authority, the knowledge is valid. And, as, according to them the process of understanding the meaning of a sentence is not inferential,28 even the knowledge of things through words should not be regarded as inferential. They consider the process of understanding the meaning to be quite different from that of perception, inference and the rest. The knowledge of things through words is an independent source of valid knowledge.
The Vaisesika philosophers consider the knowledge of things through words to be a case of inference on the following grounds.
