Logic and Language

Logic and Language Synopsis

First published in 2001. The five volumes of this series collect together some of the most significant modern contributions to the study of Indian philosophy. Volume 2: Logic and Philosophy of Language is concerned with those parts of Indian pramd-a theory that Western philosophers would count as logic and philosophy of language.

Indian philosophers and linguists were much concerned with philosophical issues to do with language, especially with theories of meaning, while the Indian logicians developed both a formalised canonical inference schema and a theory of fallacies. The logic of the standard Indian inferential model is deductive, but the premises are arrived at inductively. The later Navya-Nyaya logicians went on to develop too a powerful technical language, an intentional logic of cognitions, which became the language of all serious discourse in India.

The selections in this volume discuss Indian treatments of topics in logic and the philosophy of language like the nature of inference, negation, necessity, counterfactual reasoning, many-valued logics, theory of meaning, reference and existence, compositionality and contextualism, the sense-reference distinction, and the nature of the signification relation.