Logic and language in Indian religions

Abstract

This article concentrates on certain beliefs that many Indian thinkers implicitly accepted and that show up in an analysis of reasoned arguments they presented. These beliefs concerned the relationship between language and reality. For Brahmanical thinkers, who owed their privileged position in society in great part to their mastery of texts — the Veda — that were deemed to be directly connected to reality, this relationship between language and reality was a matter of course. For reasons of their own, Buddhist thinkers had come to think that the world of our experience is largely determined by language. This shared belief, which most often though not always remained implicit, found its way into certain arguments. These arguments remain unintelligible without an awareness of the underlying belief.