Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 09:03:42 -0500 (EST) From: "Harold F. Schiffman" Subject: Re: Logic, etc Sender: owner-linganth@cc.rochester.edu To: Adi Hastings Cc: linganthro list MIME-version: 1.0 Precedence: bulk

I'm grateful to Adi Hastings for the exegesis on Indian logics. I got into this years ago when trying to analyze negation in Tamil. It turns out that negative sentences are never morphologically balanced or equivalent, i.e. a simple "future" verb can have two negatives, one negates the simple future, the other negates the habitual-ness. If you try to form paradigms of positive and negative sentences, the morphology is always "screwed up" by our standards. I was at the time trying to develop negative sentences from positive ones by Chomsky's Syntactic Structures types of transformations, and had to give up. (I realize things are different now...) But at a conference we had on "universals in Indian grammar" many of the other presenters faulted the western binary either-or, positive-negative approach inherent in the theory of the time, and none of the people familiar with Indian logic, Sanskrit grammarians, and all that tradition, felt that the languages of India were being done justice by forcing a "western" (Chomskyan or any other categorical-rule ) paradigm on them.

I'[m not trying to say that Tamil has a differnet logic than English, but I *don't* have an answer for why the Tamil negation system is so "skewed" morphologically. (I abandoned the attempt to write a transformational grammar of Tamil negation, which was once a possible phd thesis topic for me). It's true that Tamil once had a complete negative paradigm for each and every verb; it now looks like negative forms of verbs are from a differnet planet than positive ones, or from some very different system. Maybe our western logics are the way they are because Indo-European languages have such simple (comparatively) negation systems?

(Aaron, take it away!)

Hal Schiffman

On Mon, 20 Jan 1997, Adi Hastings wrote:


>I hope this isn't too far off the topic: I'm not a serious expert, but it actually seems that in many ways, Anglo-European logic (e.g., first order predicate logic) and some schools of Indian logic (e.g, Navya-Nyaaya) are similar enough that it has been possible for many Indologists to translate the latter into the former (with varying degrees of success). Of course there are substantial differences, such as the fact that while statements are bearers of truth-values in Anglo-European logical thought, the question of "truth-values" doesn't really even come up in Navya-Nyaaya (as they are not concerned with models of formal validity). Thus, whereas the statement "all animals are pigs, all pigs have wings; therefore all animals have wings" would be formally valid, although unsound to a Western logician, the Naiyaayika (logician) would consider the statement ill- formed, because its members are known to be false (they are considered as non-referential "knowledges" or "cognitions").
>However, one may still say that, for example, "inferential" reasoning was "discovered" (constructed/invented/found/etc., whatever stance you want to take) separately by both schools of thought (the form of the typical Navya-Nyaaya inference is "q because of p, and if p then q, as in x and not in y"). The entire discipline of comparative philosophy is founded on the fact of _comparability_; the fact that while systems are identifiably "different," they nonetheless exhibit some aspect of similarity. What I find the most interesting about this is that while the form and epistomological status of the proof is similar (sometimes strikingly so), the routes by which each came about display very different sets of concerns.
>Also, you find concepts very similar to Buddhist notions of "negation" in, e.g., Schopenhauer, but this is I think due mainly to the fact that he read the Buddhists.
>Adi Hastings >Depts. of Linguistics and Anthropology >University of Chicago