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Verbal Testimony
says (vv. 100-107): "There obtains no relation between the meanings that belong to the words of a sentece (v. 100), As for the individual words of it they are found elsewhere too and so would not yield its meaning (v. 101), but they as taken together are found nowhere else and so would not yield a meaning (v. 102). Nor is sentential meaning just a jumble of the word-meanings concerned, for then even an arbitrary proximity of words should constitute a sentence (vv. 102-3). It too seems illogical that the meaning of a sentence should have nothing to do with the word-meanings concerned, for then this meaning should be evident even to one who is unacqainted with these word-meanings (vv. 105-6). So considering everything, there seems to be no basis for sentential meaning to be built upon (v. 107).”
(vv. 110–369) Like the opponent Kumärila too raises a host of issues, more or less interesting. He begins by conceding that a sentence as a unit made up of letters is not possessed of a unitary denotation just as a word as a unit made up of letters is possessed of a unitary denotation (vv. 111-12). This seems something like conceding the opponent's point, but as a matter of fact Kumärila has so many reservations to make. For one thing, denotation is learnt once for all but this can happen only in the case of individual words and not in the case of a sentence made up of words. Then Kumärila feels that it is already dfficult to explain how certain letters cognized successively yield a unitary cognition of the word coneerned and that it should be still more difficult to explain how certain letters cognized successively yield a unitary cognition of the sentence concerned (vv. 112-13). He therefore looks for a way to explain how the meaning of a sentence can be made out without cognising this sentence as a unit made up of letters (vv. 114-117); by way of solution he suggests that the cognition of the first word of a sentence is followed by the cognition of its meaning, then occurs the cognition of the second word followed by the cognition of its meaning, and so on and so forth, while the word-meanings thus learnt are ultimately recalled together and combined into a unitary whole which is what constitutes the meaning of the sentence in question. In Kumārila's language, this is the thesis that not words of a sentence but the meanings of these words are instrumental in yielding sentential meaning, It can easily be seen that this thesis virtually amounts to saying that the words of a sentence yield sentential meaning not directly, but through the mediation of their raspective meanings, a verson Kumārila will reject as invalid-- on the ground that the su pposition that a word yields meaning twice should be avoided if it can somehow be shown that the supposition that it yields meaning only once will also do. Be that as it may, in the background of such an understanding of a sentence and sentential meaning Kumārila was bound to oppose the view according to which a sentence is an impartite unit possessed of an impartito meaning, a view against which he polemizes in great details (vv. 118-228). Kumärila
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