An Introduction to Indian Philosophy (Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy) by Roy W. Perrett

Author:Roy W. Perrett [Perrett, Roy W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

As a Mīmāṃsaka atheist, Kumārila firmly rejects as epistemically unsupported the possibility that God ordained the convention at the beginning of the world, and elsewhere in his texts he offers independent arguments for this rejection. Instead he is more concerned here with the possibility that the convention is made for each person. This possibility, however, permits of two alternatives: (i) that everyone makes the same meaning assignment, or (ii) that it varies from person to person. Kumārila briskly dismisses the first alternative, apparently deeming it wildly implausible that all persons would coincidentally converge on the same meaning assignment in the absence of a previously established relation. The more interesting alternative, so far as he is concerned, is the second, which he criticizes in some detail (16.15–22).

Against the claim that there is one convention per person, Kumārila points out that in ordinary usage there is no awareness of this among members of a common linguistic community, though presumably there should be if the theory is correct. Moreover, if each person understood words according to their own conventions, then communication would be impossible. We would all be speaking and understanding different languages and no one would understand one another.

Kumārila locates what he takes to be the fundamental weakness of the conventionalist theory thus:

In order to point out a relation (for the sake of) the hearer, what relation could the speaker have recourse to? If it be the one which he has already known, then the speaker cannot be said to point it out to him (because he already knows it); and if he points out an altogether new relation, then this latter not having ever been known by the hearer to lead to the comprehension of any meaning (he could never comprehend the word used).

(6.22–3, Jha 1983: 351)

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