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Studies on Indian Philosophy
humanly possible (since few of us have sarvajñatva) within the available and relevant epistemological intersubjective sou. rces (pramāņas) at hand for each of us. Therefore, if the con. tent of a given tarka statement refers to such relations as "where there is smoke, there is fire,” where, for all things "x," where there is smoke x there is a fire x, or, (x) (sX fx), in which cognitions are confined to one or more specific pramāņas, then the range of possible instances of the specific tarka search for counter examples is confined to the range of those field-dependent possible cogntions; that is, one does pot look for smoke without fire in a lake. Thus for a “good”, conclusive tarka argument, one should be able to say that one has fully exhausted the search for counter examples in one's tarka vyāpti justifications But the noncontroversial criteria for judging that one has searched exhaustively (a) presuppose the methods at issue here and (b) are empirically impossible to attain. Thus the conviction that one has an exhaustive search may be psychologically convincing but its completeness will remain empirically undemonstrated. That is in case no counter cxamples are found and further justifications for the NCE grounds of turka are still requested, one must simply suggest that there are finite limits to the range of inter subjective experiences within which the legitimacy and probability of one's tarka-statements-being-true are humanly capable of being confirmed. The nonexhaustive absence of counter exam. ple is then claimed to be a sufficient condition for accepting the specific vyāpti in question in the NCB authorization argument. 16
Furthermore, the tarka generalization generated from NCE seems to reprsent merely simple enumeration. This is a simple type of inductive generalization which can be refuted by one specific counter example. If one is not forthcoming after an exhaustive search, one may hold (as do the Jainas) that the specific tarka claim of vyāpti is to be accepted. Then the authorized vyāpti is made the content of the application of the general drstānata-warrant to a specific inference schema
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