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THE PROBLEM OF ERROR
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it. That means it is determinate perception that is the subject of logic where the question of the distinction between true and false knowledge arises.
Nyāya advocates correspondence theory of truth. If the content of knowledge exactly corresponds to the objective reality, we have truth, otherwise error. When we have wrong perception of silver in shell, the thing, the silver, the relation of inherence, are facts of objective world. They are given in indeterminate perception. But while ‘silverness' is not related to the thing by inherehce, there, they appear related in knowledge due to some defects in conditions of knowledge. The real silverness which belongs to the real silver existing elsewhere is presented in this visual perception as the attribute of 'this' due to some extraordinary contact. Nyāya theory of error is known as thus anyathākhyātivāda or viparitakhyātivāda, i. e. erroneous cognition is misapprehension of one thing as another thing.
What Nyāya realism wants to emphasise is the fact that even the content of error has a complete objective basis and what does not exist can never be the object of knowledge. In erroneous judgement, subject is actually given, the predicate also is, though elsewhere so that non-existent is never perceived as is believed by some idealists.
According to Nyāya, valid knowledge has objective reality as it is grounded in the object itself while “all error is subjective in so far as it is due to the introduction of a certain foreign character into the object by the knowing subject.... The object all the while remains what it actually is....there is no error in the object..... The error lies in the cognition..as the cognition of a thing as something which it is not”.?
Thus, according to Nyāya, error is a misrelated fact.
