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Studies in Indian Philosophy
seems to us relatively unproblematic in comparison with various matters concerning their role in the discourse. Whether Bhartshari should be taken as having assserted those propo. sitions or merely as having voiced them on behalf of others, is a problem too complex to be resolved here.
It was Helārāja's view that the propositions expressed in verses 20 to 22 of SS, making up what we have called Bhartshari's paradox, were not asserted by Bhartshari but were merely voiced on behalf of certain actual or potential critics. In his commentary to the next Verse 23, Helārāja describes the preceding three verses as "Nyaiyāyika casuistry” (vākchala ), and he describes the subsequent verses as "an answer” to them. 14 Our own view is that those verses cannot be lightly dismissed as “casuistry", however the problem of attribution is ultimately decided. There seems to us to be a genuine paradox here, which offers no easy way out. This will be argued in the next two sections.
IV
We have put before ourselves two instances of the unna. meability thesis, concerning two fundamental semantic relations significance (BI) and inherence (B2). One passage of the text states that these two relations are distinct ("inherence...extends beyond the signifying function'): (SS 19) and another passage states that they are closely interconnected (SS 13). Without trying to work out the exact connections between them, we have examined with some care the textual basis for each of these two instances of the unnameability thesis. Now we propose to move the discussion to a more analytical level on which we will begin to open for ourselves the question of the unnameability thesis and its grounds in the structure of language. In this section we will follow what we take to be Bhartshari's insights, but deal with them using analytical resources beyond those that were available to Bhartshari.
Examining the unnameability thesis as a contemporary issue in the philosophy of language, we believe that thesis
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