Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 21:49:53 -0600 (CST) From: Adi Hastings Subject: Re: Logic, etc Sender: owner-linganth@cc.rochester.edu X-Sender: amhastin@kimbark.uchicago.edu To: "Harold F. Schiffman" Cc: linganthro list Reply-to: adi merwan hastings MIME-version: 1.0 Precedence: bulk X-Authentication-warning: kimbark.uchicago.edu: amhastin owned process doing -bs On Mon, 20 Jan 1997, Harold F. Schiffman wrote:

>This white English-speaking male would also like to point out the existence of other logics, e.g. schools of logic in ancient India, including "Buddhist" logic, with their own kinds of "epistemology" etc. I'd have to disagree with Aaron, then; otherwise how did ancient Indian philosophers "discover" a logic that was not consistent with the western type? I think they're both constructed/invented, rather than discovered. Or am I missing something?

>Hal Schiffman

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
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