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Copyright by Colin Malcolm Keating 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Colin Malcolm Keating certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Speaking Indirectly: Theories of Non-Literal Speech in Indian Philosophy Committee: Stephen Phillips, Supervisor Ray Buchanan Josh Dever Hans Kamp Larry McCrea Speaking Indirectly: Theories of Non-Literal Speech in Indian Philosophy by Colin Malcolm Keating, B.A., M.A. DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN May 2015 pada-vākya-pramāṇeṣu tad etat pratibimbitam | yo yojayati sāhitye tasya vānī prasādati || The communicative function is reflected in words, sentences, knowledge sources; The intelligence of the one who employs it in composition becomes bright. Mukulabhaṭṭa, Abhidhā-vṛtta-mātṛkā Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without the support and en- couragement of many people. I thank my peers in the philosophy department for their willingness to critique my ideas in seminars and informal conversa- tions. I thank R.K. Sharma for his introduction to Pāṇini and Patañjali at the Ananda Ashram in New York and Jo Brill for her discussion of the vyākaraṇa tradition with me there. Among the philosophy faculty at University of Texas at Austin, Ray Buchanan, Josh Dever, Hans Kamp, Al Martinich, and Stephen Phillips all provided me with essential feedback and guidance, and I thank them for their unwavering support of this project. In the Asian Studies de- partment I am grateful to Patrick Olivelle and Donald Davis for sharpening my Sanskrit skills and deepening my knowledge of Indian intellectual traditions. I am indebted to Larry McCrea at Cornell University, whose groundbreak- ing work on Mukulabhaṭṭa has been an essential guide for my own research. Finally, my dissertation advisor, Stephen Phillips, has been a patient men- tor and I have greatly benefited from hours spent with him reading Sanskrit, working on translations, and discussing philosophical questions. Where I suc- ceed in being a sensitive reader, a sahṛdaya, I attribute this skill to Phillips’ tutelage. v Speaking Indirectly: Theories of Non-Literal Speech in Indian Philosophy Publication No. Colin Malcolm Keating, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Supervisor: Stephen Phillips How do hearers recognize when someone is speaking figuratively, and how do they recover the content–whatever it is–of an utterance? “Speaking Indirectly” explores this question in Indian philosophy, showing along the way that it is a helpful conversation partner with Western philosophy of language. Focusing on the debate between ninth-century Indian philosophers Mukulabhaṭṭa and Ānandavardhana about competing explanations of non-literal meaning, I ar- gue that Mukulabhaṭṭa’s proposal can be understood in the spirit of Gricean pragmatics, and is broadly successful. I also show that he tacitly appeals to reasoning known as arthāpatti to explain the interpretive process, a process which I conclude is a version of inference to the best explanation. I also em- ploy contemporary conceptual tools, such as the theory of sort-shifting, to illustrate the plausibility of Mukulabhaṭṭa’s analysis of non-literal speech. A significant aspect of my dissertation is a new, philosophically informed, En- glish translation of Mukulabhaṭṭa’s Sanskrit text, the Abhidhā-vṛtta-mātṛkā (Fundamentals of the Communicative Function). vi Table of Contents Acknowledgments v Abstract vi Chapter 1. Introduction 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Mukulabhaṭṭa: An Overlooked Minority Voice . 7 1.2 Linguistic Communication and Interpretation . 13 1.3 Poetics and Dramaturgy . 20 1.3.1 Early Texts: Taxonomies of Emotion and Figuration . 20 1.3.2 Turning Point: Ānandavardhana’s “Light on Suggestion” 25 1.4 Mīmāṃsā Philosophy . 30 1.5 Philosophy of the Grammarians . 39 1.6 Mukula’s Epistemological Project . 44 1.7 Methodology and Précis . 49 Chapter 2. The Problem of Epistemic Access 55 2.1 Introduction . 55 2.2 Speech Acts and Mīmāṃsā Philosophy of Language . 56 2.3 Epistemology and Language . 66 2.3.1 Testimony . 72 2.3.2 Inferential Reason . 81 2.3.3 Presumption . 89 2.4 Conclusion . 109 Chapter 3. Knowing What is Meant 111 3.1 Introduction . 111 3.2 The Bhāṭṭa Theory: Words as Sentential Building Blocks . 112 3.2.1 The Organizing Principle of Bhāvanā . 112 3.2.2 Assembling Lexical Meanings . 121 3.3 The Prābhākara Theory: Words as Arrows Flying to their Mark 124 3.3.1 Learning Meaning through Action . 126 3.3.2 Contextualism and “What is Said” . 128 3.4 Contemporary and Indian Theories of Sentence Meaning . 135 3.5 Emotions and Implicatures in Ānandavardhana . 139 3.5.1 Implied figures of speech and other meanings . 140 3.5.2 The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Rasa ....... 146 vii Chapter 4. On Knowing the Non-Literal 152 4.1 Ānanda’s Theory of Suggestion: Motivations and Overview . 152 4.2 What is Suggested Meaning? . 154 4.2.1 Speaker’s Aim with Regard to Literal Meaning . 155 4.2.2 Interpreter’s Phenomenology . 162 4.2.3 The Basis for What is Suggested . 167 4.2.4 What is Suggested . 169 4.3 Suggestion is Not Like Lexical Meaning . 179 4.4 Suggestion is Not Like Lakṣaṇā ................. 181 4.5 Suggestion is Not Like Convention . 184 Chapter 5. The Irreducibility of Suggestion 194 5.1 Introduction . 194 5.1.1 Against suggestion as anumāna .............. 203 5.2 Recontextualizing the argument . 209 5.2.1 Recovering what is suggested through inferential reasoning213 5.2.2 Justifying what is suggested through inferential argument 217 5.3 Beyond anumāna: concluding remarks . 220 Chapter 6. Recovering Meaning through Presumption 223 6.1 Lakṣaṇā as removing incompatibility . 224 6.2 Mukula’s hybrid view as Gricean . 233 6.2.1 Mukula on sentence meaning . 239 6.3 Failure of calculability and a solution . 242 6.3.1 Convention, indication, and calculability . 246 6.3.2 Giving up calculability . 252 Chapter 7. Sort-Shifting, Lexical Semantics, and Lakṣaṇā 259 7.1 Introduction . 259 7.2 Mukula’s Challenge . 259 7.3 Mukula’s Analysis of lakṣaṇā ................... 262 7.4 Sentence-Internal Lakṣaṇā .................... 265 7.5 Type- and Sort-Shifting . 267 7.6 Mukula on Metaphoric Transfer . 274 7.7 Fat Devadatta and arthāpatti ................... 278 7.8 Conclusion . 285 Chapter 8. Conclusion 287 Chapter 9. English Translation of the Fundamentals of the Com- municative Function 293 Appendix 372 viii Appendix 1. Sanskrit Grammar 373 1.1 Nouns, Pronouns . 373 1.2 Verbs . 375 1.3 Word Order and Sentence Construction . 378 Bibliography 384 ix Chapter 1 Introduction “The list says...when you are finished in the living room, put out the lights. Oh–I’ll just unscrew all of these bulbs and put them on the clothesline outside.” Amelia Bedelia “When I use a word,” Humpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master– that’s all.” Through the Looking Glass We frequently use a single expression in multiple ways.1 A person who doesn’t recognize this capacity of language would quickly find herself in the position of Amelia Bedelia, the literal-minded protagonist of children’s books. Asked to draw the drapes, she sketches a picture; told to dress the turkey, she puts it in fancy clothes. But despite language’s flexibility, it isn’t a magic wand that 1Portions of this chapter appeared as “Mukulabhaṭṭa’s Defense of Lakṣaṇā: How We Use Words to Mean Something Else, but Not Everything Else” in The Journal of Indian Philosophy. Keating 2013a. 1 we can use to convey any and all meanings we’d like, in whichever context we please. Though Humpty Dumpty says he “pays a word extra” when he makes it do a lot of work, his uttering “glory” to mean a “nice knock-down argument” isn’t evidence of his mastery of language but a profound confusion. Many factors, not all under the speaker’s control, constrain the power of speech to convey meaning. Indian philosophers distinguished between two powers: the primary and the secondary, or ‘mukhya’ and ‘lakṣaṇā.’2 The distinction between primary and secondary capacities of language in clas- sical Indian philosophy is, generally speaking, the distinction between literal and non-literal meaning, respectively. In future chapters, we will see how both of these distinctions are not without complications, but as a first pass, we can say that the literal meaning of a sentence token is composed of ordinary word-referents, properties, and the like with the help of some basic contextual rules. In contrast, non-literal meaning goes beyond ordinary reference—which is grounded in a language that pairs expressions to objects. Another way to get at this contrast is to say that literal meaning is encoded into a particular utterance through linguistic rules whereas non-literal meaning is grounded in broader principles having to do with speaker aims, conventions, and the like. In classical Indian philosophy, primary meaning is usually characterized as be- 2The word ‘lakṣaṇā’ is often translated as “indication,” or “secondary meaning.” I will leave it untranslated, in part because no single English word captures the range of its meaning. In addition, lakṣaṇā plays a central theoretical role in what is to come, and I prefer to leave open precisely what it is, and allow exposition of the Sanskrit texts to fill in the concept, rather than the connotations attached to an English translation. Throughout the dissertation, I will use English words instead of Sanskrit wherever possible, with footnotes to give more etymological and conceptual background.