A Fragment of the Indian Philosophical Tradition: Theory of Prama

Author(s): J. N. Mohanty
Source: Philosophy East and West, Vol. 38, No. 3, Fiftieth Anniversary, Department of
Philosophy, University of Hawaii (Jul., 1988), pp. 251-260
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1398865
Accessed: 07/03/2009 09:13

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uhp.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Hawai'i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Philosophy
East and West.

http://www.jstor.org
J. N. Mohanty A fragment of the Indian philosophical tradition-
Theory ofpramtna

There are two ways in which one may look critically at a tradition: from within
or from the outside. In this article, I intend to do it the first way. Raising the
sort of questions that I will be asking already implies a certain estrangement
from that tradition, but at the same time I do so not in order to find the faults
or limitations which may characterize it, but with a view to continuing and
creatively advancing the traditional modes of thinking. Living outside the
country where that tradition developed and still has deep roots, and exposed
to a powerful and temporally and culturally more relevant mode of thinking,
one runs the risk of being an over-hasty, shallow, and even arrogant critic of a
long and hallowed tradition. One gathers the illusion of being free, free from all
tradition, and thus justified in critiquing one's own. But if that sense of free-
dom is illusory, this critique is superficial. If the critic claims to be free from all
traditions, he will be forgetting what Gadamer has so poignantly reminded us:
that he will be thinking from within a new tradition, for example, the tradition
of (modern) rationalism.
In talking about the Indian philosophical tradition, I will be referring to the
Indian darsanas, the classical philosophical schools-and only indirectly to the
scriptures from which those schools derive their ideas and motivations. This
decision, justified by usage of antiquity, leaves us with a less ambiguous dis-
course to reflect upon, and makes it possible to avoid many familiar pitfalls.
Talking about Indian philosophy, it is not uncommon, for example, to insist
that Indian philosophy is deeply spiritual, that its goal is not simple intellectual
jugglery, but spiritual transformation of one's nature, that philosophy is a
means to the attainment of moksa or spiritual freedom. Such large claims are,
to say the least, highly misleading; in a familiar construal, they may even be
false. The following remarks may partly clear the way for a more fruitful reflec-
tion on the nature of Indian philosophy.
In the first place, there is no doubt that the Upanisadsexhibit a strong spiri-
tual motivation: knowing the atman is said to bring about an end to worldly
sufferings and a state of spiritual freedom (whatever the latter may mean). It is
a frequent mistake not to distinguish between the spirituality of the Upanisads
and the alleged spirituality of the darsanaseven when the latter trace their ideas
and doctrines back to the Upanisads. Secondly, thinkingabout spiritual matters
is not itself spiritual. To assert this is not to degrade such thinking, but only to
reiterate its nature qua thinking. Qua thinking, it may be thorough or super-
ficial, adventurous or conventional, logically rigorous or lacking in rigor, criti-
cal or creative-but neither spiritual nor nonspiritual. Consider an analogous

J. N. Mohanty is Professor of Philosophy and Chairperson of the Department of Philosophy at

Temple University.
Philosophy East and West, volume 38, no. 3 (July 1988). ? by the University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved.
252 Mohanty

point: thinking about perception is not itself perceptual. Another thing often
lost sight of by those who argue for the spiritual character of the darsanas is
that, although the darsanas, at least some of them, recognize sabda as a
pramdna or means of true knowledge, they do not eo ipso identify saibdawith
experience of some sort. This matter about which the philosophical tradition
had great clarity is misconstrued by those who want to argue that recognition
of sabda as a pramdna is tantamount to according to the spiritual experiences
of the "seers" an authoritative status. I will return to this confusion later. The
same sort of confusion characterizes such cliches as that the Indian philos-
ophies make use of intuition rather than intellect. Quite apart from the fact
that the uses of "intuition" and "intellect" are many and muddled, I wish to
remind those who revel in such cliches that none of the darsanasuses a pramana,
which suffers a renderinginto that much misused word "intuition."
Without belaboring my point any further, let me turn to the positive char-
acterizations that I intend to submit. I will divide my remarks into three
groups: those concerning pramdna or means of true cognition; those concern-
ing prameya or objects of true cognition; and the overall status of the theory, its
aim and its relation to other sorts of inquiry.
11

A philosophical theory needs not only to elaborate a view about the nature of
things, but also to back up this account with a theory of evidence, rationaljusti-
fication, and critical appraisal. It needs not only to use evidence, rational justi-
fications, and critical appraisals, but also to have a theory of those theoretical
practices. It needs to have generalized answers to such questions as: when is a
cognitive claim valid? What sorts of evidences are acceptable in adjudicating
the validity of a cognitive claim? What sorts of justifications of beliefs are ac-
ceptable? In critically appraising rival claims, what criteria are admissible?
Where there are conflicting criteria, what are their relative strengths and weak-
nesses? These are the tasks to which the pramianatheory addresses itself. It is a
singular sign of the high level of intellectual sophistication of the darsanas that
they all, at some time or other in the course of their development, came up with
their theories ofpramdna.
As is rather well known, these theories differed not alone with regard to the
definition of pramin.a (and the implied concept of prami, that is, true cogni-
tion), but also with regard to the number of pramdnas and their specific na-
tures. My purpose here is to draw attention to some striking features that
emerge in these discussions, and which throw some light, however dim, on the
Indian concept of rationality.
To begin with, let us note an important difference in locution, which, how-
ever, is not a mere matter of locution, but points to deep substantive issues. In
the Western philosophical tradition, it was usual, until recent times, to ask:
does knowledge arise from reason or from experience?The rationalists and the
253

empiricists differed in their answers. These answers, in their various formu-

lations, determined the course of Western philosophy. In the Sanskrit philo-
sophical vocabulary, the words 'reason' and 'experience' have no exact syn-
onyms, and the epistemological issue was never formulated in such general
terms. On the other hand, a question which was asked (and which is likely to be
mistaken for the question just raised in the Western tradition) is: is perception
the only pramdna or is anumdna a pramiina? Neither is 'perception' synony-
mous with 'experience', nor 'anumdna' with 'reason'. Those who recognized
perception as a pramdna (in fact, every philosophical school did so) often did
not restrict perception to sensory perception, and did not restrict sensory per-
ception to the domain of sensible qualities, such as color, and material objects,
such as sticks and stones. Among things that were taken to be sensuously per-
ceived are: the self and its qualities, such as pleasure, pain, desire and cogni-
tion; universals, such as redness; natural-kind essences, such as cowness; and
relations, such as contact and inherence (of a quality in a substance; of a uni-
versal in its instances). That anumdnaor inference is different from reason (of
the rationalists) is clear from its very etymology; it follows upon perception. If
we leave the Buddhists out, no school of Indian philosophy ascribed to infer-
ence a 'constructive' role. It knows what can be known otherwise. There is al-
ways a priority of perception. There are no Indian rationalists. Neither percep-
tion nor inference pointed to any specific faculty of the mind-as 'experience'
and 'reason' did in classical Western philosophies. The same faculties or cog-
nitive instruments-operating in different manners-resulted in one case in
perception, in another in inference.
I have belabored this point in order to caution against any temptation to see
in the pramdna theories near kins of the Western epistemologies. The preceding
remarks lead to another feature of the pramana theories. A pramana is the
specific cause of an irreducible type of pramd or true cognition. There are two
different sorts of reason why a particular pramdna is not recognized by a cer-
tain school. One reason is that the sort of cognition which it causes is just not
true cognition: this is the reason why some Buddhists would not regard infer-
ence as a pramdna: for an inferential cognition apprehends its object as an in-
stance of a universal rule and not in its uniqueness, and so is not true to its
object's own nature. But one may give a quite different sort of reason why a pu-
tative pramaina is not really one. When the Vaisesikas deny that sabda or words
can serve as a pramdna, they do not deny that the putative linguistically gener-
ated cognition is true; what they insist upon is that it is not of an irreducible
variety, that as a matter of fact it is reducible to inference. There are thus three
claims made by a pramdna theory: (1) some cognitions are true, that is, pramd;
(2) some of these true cognitions belong to a type that is irreducible to any
other type; and (3) true cognitions belonging to such an irreducible type are
caused by a unique aggregate of causal conditions.
Thus, a sort of causal theory of knowledge is built into the pramana theory:
254 Mohanty

a true cognition must not only be true to its object (arthdvyabhicarin),but

must also be generated in the right manner, that is, by the appropriate causes.
Expressed in a modern philosophical style, this amounts to saying: S knows
that p if S has a cognitive state having the form 'p', if this cognitive state is true,
and if it is brought about in the right sort of way.

This last formulation in terms of a cognitive state leads me to the third

feature to which I would like to draw attention. Western thought has been torn
not only by the conflictingclaims of reason and experience,but also, at least since
Descartes, by the dualism of mind and matter, the subjective and the objective.
One of the offsprings of the latter distinction is the distinction between the
private and the public. In more recent philosophy this has emerged as the prob-
lem of psychologism. Epistemology and theory of logic have been haunted by
the specter of psychologism, and have sought to banish all reference to the
inner mental states from their discourse. The consequence has been pure
objectivism-be it of the Platonic sort or of the physicalist sort. Contrasted
with this, the Indian epistemologists have made unabashed use of 'mentalistic'
discourse, and have never quite worried about the problems of psychologism,
private language, and so forth. It is possible to accuse them simply of uncritical
naivete. But given the heightened critical acumen which they exhibit, the
reasons have to be sought elsewhere. It is well known that for most Indian
philosophers, mind (if that is how manas is to be translated) is rather a subtle
form of prakrti or matter, a nonconscious inner sense organ, but not a domain
of private experiences. Cognitions and other experiences belong to the self,
dtman, and can be 'perceived' only by their owner (if self-manifesting, then so
only to the owner). But if S alone has an inner perception of his experience, it
does not follow that none else can know them by any of the pramdnas other
than perception. What is more, these episodes, even if belonging to a particular
owner, have their ideal intentional contents, which numerically distinct epi-
sodes, belonging to different owners and occuring at different temporal loca-
tions, can have in common. I have shown elsewhere how, given this conception
of "mental episodes," one is enabled to construct a logic of cognitions with
appropriate logical rules for inference. To talk about a cognitive event, then,
need not arouse the specter of psychologism.2
I referred earlier to the causal story that pervades the Indian epistemologies.
It is now possible to look at it more closely. Possibly since Kant, it has been
usual to distinguish sharply questions of epistemic justification (quaestiojuris)
from questions of causal origin (quaestiofactis). It is only in more recent times
that a causal theory of knowledge has come very much into vogue, but the
causal theories of knowledge have to be able to find room for justificatory con-
cepts such as logical validity and truth. In this regard, the Indian epis-
temologies can serve as a useful model. As B. K. Matilal has insisted in his
recent book on perception, the pramdnas serve both as causes and as justi-
255

fications of cognitive episodes.3 It seems to me that this was made possible by

first separating out noncontroversial instances of true cognitions from such in-
stances of nontrue cognitions, and looking, at the same time, for (1) the marks
that distinguish the former from the latter, and (2) the distinctive causal con-
ditions which produce the former and not the latter, and, finally, combining (1)
and (2) in the definition of pramana. In the case of the theories which regard
truth as svatah, the causal conditions producing cognitions (of a certain type)
and those producing true cognitions (of that type) coincide.
Causal theories are regarded as being notoriously reductionistic, and there-
fore suspect for the logician-cum-epistemologist. Not so in the Indian tradi-
tion, which regarded them as being descriptive and compatible with the
uniqueness of cognitions and their claim to truth. There are two aspects of this
liberalism: for one thing, the reductionist causal laws are physicalistic and
oriented to the prevailing physical theory, while the causal laws used by the
Indian epistemologists are formulated in terms of such heterogenous elements
as physical contacts, revived memories, and desires to have a certain sort of
knowledge, for example-if needed, even activation of traces of past karma
and the ubiquitous passage of time. Secondly, such a causal story is not explan-
atory but descriptive, for it is formulated in a way that wishes to adapt the
story to the intuitive needs of a cognitive event rather than to submit to the
constraints of an available physical theory. The general constraints were rather
those of a large ontological theory.
As regards pramina theory, I will make only two more comments before
passing on to the prameya theory, that is, ontology. These two remarks will
concern anumdna(or inference) and sabda (word), in that order.
Much has been said, in the secondary literature, of the fact that the Indian
theory of anumdnais psychologistic (it tells a story about how inferential cogni-
tion arises) and nonformal (it requires an instance where the universal major
premise is satisfied). Both characterizations are right, but unless correctly
understood they are likely to mislead. I have already said how psychology and
logic were reconciled in Indian thought. The theory of inference is a good illus-
tration of this position. The rapprochement between psychology and logic was
done by logicizing psychology as well as by psychologizing logic: the former by
assuming that the psychological process of reasoning conforms to the logical
(any seeming deviance, as in supposedly fallacious reasoning, being due to mis-
construal of the premises); and the latter by making logic a logic of cognitions
rather than of propositions. It is not that the Indian theory of anumdnadoes
not know of formal validity. In fact a formally valid mood can be abstracted
from a valid Nyaya anumina. But since the interest was in cognitions (and not
in either sentences or in propositions), and in anumdna as a pramdna, as a
source of true cognition, the merely formally valid inference, as in tarka or
counterfactuals, was left out of consideration.
This brings me to sabda or 'word' as a pramana or source of true cognition.
256 Mohanty

It is really here that the true foundation and the deeper roots of the Hindu
tradition lie. The mere recognition of sabda as a pramdna is itself a novel
feature of the Indian epistemologies.The Western epistemologies recognize one
or more of the following sorts of knowledge: perception, reasoning, introspec-
tion, and memory. Many, in more recent philosophy, have come to emphasize
the decisive role that language plays in shaping our knowledge. But to the best
of my knowledge, no one recognizes language-or verbal utterance-as a
means by itself of acquiring knowledge about the world. And yet how much do
we know simply by hearing others, by reading books and so forth, not to
speak of the religious and moral beliefs that we derive from perusal of the
scriptures? The Indian epistemologies consequently recognized sabda (that is,
hearing the utterances of a competent speaker) not only as a pramdna, but as
the decisive source of our cognitions about all those matters that transcend the
limits of possible sensory experience.
To bring out some peculiarities of the thesis of sabda-pramana,I would like
to emphasize the following points.
First, sabda, as a pramina, is not a mere word, but a sentence-and that,
too, is not a written, but a spoken sentence. There is undoubtedly a priority of
the spoken and the heard over the written.
Secondly, with regard to language learning, most Indian theorists emphasize
imperative sentences rather than indicative sentences. The sentence utterances
are primarily-if not exclusively-to give orders, to suggest courses of action
to be undertaken or avoided, and so forth, and not to state facts.
Thirdly, in their theory of meaning (both of words and of sentences), most
Indian theorists have subscribed to a pure referential theory and do not have a
concept of sense as distinguished from reference. (Since I made this diagnosis
two decades ago, several people have tried to show where to look for such a
theory of sense. Most convincing of these attempts is by Mark Siderits. While
Siderits is right in tracing a sort of sense theory to the Buddhist apoha theory, I
think my general diagnosis is correct.) A direct referential theory permits the
theory of sabdapramdnato collapse the distinction between understanding and
knowing. While translations of empty expressions like "hare's horn" a la
Russell abound in the Nyaya literature, the real stumbling block before the
theory is to have some reasonably acceptable account of what it is to under-
stand a false sentence. Sabdapramdnamust be-even for the Naiyayika, if they
are to be consistent-intrinsically true. False sentences cannot generate any
understanding (sdbdabodha), not to speak of prama. But, of course, on the
theory, sabdabddhdand sabdajanyapramdare the same! The enormous problems
that this identification generates are all too obvious.4
Fourthly, there is one area of knowledge where the claim of sabda to be an
irreducible pramdna is strongest: this is the domain of what ought and ought
not to be done. If factual truths may possibly be established either by percep-
tion or by reasoning of some sort, our only source of knowing what ought and
257

ought not to be done-it may reasonably be claimed-is verbal instruction,

written or spoken, by moral teachers, elders, or scriptures.
Finally, there is a large claim, supporting the tradition like a rock, that sruti,
that is, the sacred, the heard, scriptures (the Vedas and the Upanisads) are
apauruseya, that is, not composed by any human author. This gives them a
freedom from possible fault, an incorrigible authority that no text with human
authorship could support. I will return to this concept of 'apauruseyatva'at the
end of this article.
III

What sort of theories ofprameya, of possible objects of true knowledge, did the
Indian philosophers hold? Given the great variety of ontologies-ranging from
the pluralism of Nyaya-Vaisesika to the monism of Advaita Vedanta-what
can be done at this point is to draw attention to some salient features of those
ontologies.
The first thing to be noted is that these ontologies do not countenance any
abstract entity of the sorts that ontologies in the West admit. Among the
familiar abstract entities, we have Fregean senses (for example, propositions),
numbers, and universals. I have already said that, in my view, full-fledged
Fregean senses are not to be found. Numbers are reduced to properties (gunas)
of sets. Universals, although common, are not the sort of rarefied entities
amenable only to the grasp of pure reason, which characterize them in the
Western metaphysical tradition. They are rather more concrete entities, per-
ceived through the same sense organ by which their instances are. Nor are there
pure unactualized possibilities. It is not surprising that these last creatures are
absent, for their habitat in the Western metaphysical tradition, God's mind,
does not play that role of creating out of nothing in Indian thought. In the ab-
sence of possibilia and of abstract entities such as propositions, some standard
concepts of necessary truth and its opposite contingent truth just cannot find
any formulation in the Indian systems. Thus, we have accounts of what the
world does consist of, but not of what might have been or could not possibly
not be. Recall that the standard formulation of vydpti is extensional ("It is
never the case that in all those loci where smoke is present, fire is absent"), but
not modal ("It is impossible that.... ").
One reason why, in traditional Western metaphysics, the metaphysical
scheme claimed a sort of necessity over and against those features of the world
which the sciences study is that metaphysics and science have stood sharply
separated ever since the beginning of metaphysics in Aristotle. Metaphysics, on
this account, is concerned not with beings, but with being qua being-the lat-
ter, that is 'being qua being', being construed in various well-known ways (the
highest being; the most general predicates or categories; the meaning of
'being'-to recall a few). For the Indian metaphysicians, science and meta-
physics remain continuous. Both undertake to understand the structure of the
258 Mohanty

world; they differ only in their order of generality. The Advaita Vedanta is the
only exception in this regard: the world being unreal, on this theory, it is left
to empirical science; and metaphysics, if that is what para vidyd needs to be
called (which is indeed doubtful), is the knowledge of the one Being underly-
ing beings.
If creation out of nothing, and so creation in the strict sense, has no place in
Indian thought, that simply is not a marginal phenomenon for the darsanas,
but-as I believe it can be shown-determines some very central features not
only of the Indian cosmologies, but also of the metaphysical notions of God,
substance, time and, negation. Unfortunately, I cannot undertake an investiga-
tion of that problem on this occasion.

IV
In this last and concluding section, I would like to make a few remarks on the
pramdna-prameyastructure in its entirety, that is, on the philosophical en-
terpriseas illustratedin the darsanas.While engaged in highly sophisticatedphi-
losophical activity, the Indian thinkers did not explicitly and self-consciously
focus on the nature of their enterprise. It is generally in response to the skepti-
cal challenges of a Madhyamika that sometimes they would, while defending
their enterprise, remark on the nature of what they would be doing. Without
going into textual details, let me state some of the main issues.
1. The Madhyamika critique is not merely a critique of the epistemology,
but also a critique of the ontology. The critic insists on their mutual depen-
dence. You cannot decide what the pramidnasare unless you have decided what
things there are to be known. And you cannot settle this latter question unless
you have, at hand, the means of knowing. Where, then, do you begin? If the
circularity cannot be broken, why not give up the entire enterprise?
2. The pramdna-prameyatheorist's response to this challenge has been, in
brief, that it presupposes an unnecessarily strong reading of the unity of the
two parts of a darsana. There is no one-to-one relation between a pramana
and its prameya. One and the same thing can be known by more than one
pramdna. One and the same system of ontology can be made to go together
with different epistemologies: consider the Nyaya and the Vaisesika. The
mutual dependence that threatens the relation between cognition in general
and object in general is broken by specifying both and establishing a many-one
or one-many relation between terms on each side.

3. What (2) entails is that a darsana is not a seamless unity such that parts of
it cannot be taken out of the context of that system. My interpretation goes
against the traditionalist's view of it, which regards each darsana as a unique
point of view. Among moderns, the Russian emigre, David Zilberman, (whose
259

untimely death was a serious loss to the cause of Indian philosophy) held this
holistic view of a darsana-which I reject here.

4. The reflective question of what sort of knowledge a philosophical system

itself yields (or amounts to) and if it can itself be appropriated into one or more
of the pramdnas recognized by the system, is not explicitly asked, but the prac-
tice suggests that quite often it is the latter alternative that was chosen. The
reason-already hinted at earlier-lay in not recognizing that philosophical
knowledge is a knowledge that is, qua knowledge, distinct from the sorts of
knowledge that are thematized within the system. An alternative way out,
which would consist in distinguishing between understanding and knowing
(whereby philosophy yields understanding, but not knowledge), was not open
-in view of the purely referential theory of meaning. When the Vedantin says
that knowledge of brahman brings about moksa, this knowledge is such that
both the knowledge and the entity of which it is knowledge are thematized
within the system. When the Nyaya suitrasays that knowledge of the sixteen
paddrthas brings about the highest good, what sort of cognition is it? Is it by
one or more of the pramdnas?The answer seems to be 'yes'.

5. Students of the darsanas often wonder from where did the early
masters-the authors of the sutras and Bhdsyas-derive that framework (the
list ofpramdnas and prameyas) which the later authors went on refining. To say
that they elaborated a way of seeing-using the verbal root 'drs' (= to see) is
not to assuage that anxiety. It is not in any case true that the later authors
simply refined and clarified the framework suggested by the founding fathers.
They also changed and modified it within limits (which also speaks against a
strong holistic reading of the darsanas.) The more common response was to
trace the framework back to the sruti (the heard texts with no human author).
Consider the intellectual phenomenon that philosophical systems as diverse as
Nyaya and Vedanta claimed affiliation with the sruti. How then should the
nature of sabdapramdnabe construed so that this paradoxical situation may be
rendered intelligible?I suggest that for this purpose the nature of sabdapramdna
as applied to sruti be construed in a manner that is implicit in the tradition's
understanding of itself but not explicitly formulated as such. And it is here
that I differ from the orthodoxy in interpreting the role of sruti vis-a-vis the
philosophies.
The apauruseyatvaof sruti means, for me, neither that the texts are not com-
posed at all (thus I deny its literal construction) nor that those texts express
some supernormal, mystic experience. Not the first, for there is enough internal
evidence that the texts were composed and also because the literal construal
makes no sense. Not the second, for-in my view-sentences do not express
experiences, but rather thoughts. This last thesis I would like to defend, but
260 Mohanty

this is not the occasion to do so. Setting aside these two commonly held inter-
pretations, I wish to suggest the following.
First, in understanding the sruti texts, it is utterly irrelevant and of no use to
appeal to the intentions of their authors. The texts, the words themselves, are
primary in the sense that they are available to us, and it is they that define for
us the tradition. We use them to interpret our experiences, our world, and our-
selves, and in doing so we also interpret those words themselves. Whereas orth-
odoxy ascribes to the words of the sruti what it takes to be the meaning, I
leave open the possibilities of interpreting them. It is this plasticity of meaning,
this endless possibility of interpretation, the continuing challenge they make
to us, which sets the texts of the sruti apart from those of smrti. They are
foundational not because they express truths which are infallible, but because
they define the parameters within which the Hindu philosophers asked ques-
tions, understood their concerns, and appraised their answers. In this sense,
sabda (as sruti) is not itself a pramina, but underlies the latter's applications.
Apauruseyasrutiis not the supremepramdna, infallible and raised above all the
rest. It is rather the source of all those concerns and inquiries(not answers) in
the solution of which the differentpramdnasexhibit their special philosophical
relevance.
Who, then, is thinking within that tradition? My answer is that it is not nec-
essary to be thinking within the tradition, to subscribe to any or all of the an-
swers of the schools, but what is necessary is to share the concerns as sources
of philosophical problems. I define the tradition, then, in terms of concerns,
rather than in terms of beliefs.

NOTES

1. Compare B. K. Matilal, Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge

(Oxford, 1986), esp. p. 35.
2. Compare my "Psychologism in Indian Logical Theory," in B. K. Matilal and J. L. Shaw,
eds., Analytical Philosophy in ComparativePerspective(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), pp. 203-211.
3. Compare Matilal, Perception,esp. pp. 105 and 135.
4. I have discussed this in detail in my unpublished Presidential Address to the 61st session of
the Indian Philosophical Congress, October 1986.