Something wrong with the WSC?

[Ferenc Ruzsa]

Friends,

I am not allowed to speak at the 13th World Sanskrit Conference in 
Edinburgh. This might seem a purely personal affair [and it is: living in 
Budapest, it is not exactly nice to be cut off from an important forum of 
communication with the scholarly community], but perhaps it does have some 
general interest as well.

1. I offered a paper in which I intended to disprove the generally accepted 
view according to which the cosmogonical myth of the Puru.sa-suukta is 
Indo-European inheritance.
2. It was rejected – no reason given.
3. After inquiry for the ground of the decision in e-mail I was told that 
"the subject matter ... was not sufficiently relevant to the concerns of a 
World Sanskrit Conference."
4. I offered another paper on old Nyaaya inference. As it was submitted 
after the deadline [of course, since the previous rejection was received a 
month after the deadline] it was evaluated as a special favour for me.
5. Rejected again: they "do not find it to contain an original idea, and 
therefore reject it." I quote my abstract below, so that anybody may see if 
it contains anything new or not.

I am unaware of any conceivable personal reason for this double rejection.
Any comments?

Ferenc Ruzsa

------ The abstract: --------
The centrality of udaahara.na in old Nyaaya inference

The five-membered naiyaayika inference seems unnecessarily complex. The 
following three questions are inherently interrelated:
– What is the role of the fourth and fifth members, when they are but 
repetitions of the second (proof) and the first (proposition/conclusion)?
– Why do we have in the third member an example instead of a statement of 
the general rule?
– Why are there two examples, positive and contrary, when the rules 
illustrated by them are but contrapositives of each other, i.e. they are 
logically equivalent?
Later Nyaaya practically dropped the last two members, keeping them only for 
rhetoric reasons in public arguments (paraarthaanumaana). And already 
Dharmakiirti suggested that the first two members only constitute a valid 
inference (the general rule being implied by them). But the Suutra is very 
strict on the five members: omitting or adding an extra member means 
unconditional defeat in a debate (nigrahasthaana).
Already in the Suutra we find clear awareness of the fact that no example is 
a valid substitution of the general rule: one kind of false reason, 
hetvaabhaasa is the savyabhicaara, where there is an exception to the rule. 
And later Nyaaya develops the theory of the upaadhis, restricting conditions 
to correct such faulty inferences.
The two kinds of example are generally justified with reference to those 
rather unusual cases where either of the two is not possible (kevalaanvayin, 
kevalavyatirekin). This explanation, although ingenious, is not fully 
convincing as it is extremely difficult to find a plausible example of a 
kevala-vyatireki li"ngam.
We get closer to a possible answer once we get rid of the notion that the 
anumaana is but a contorted version of the very simple Barbara-type 
syllogism. Then we may recognise that the Nyaaya inference is essentially 
inductive and intensional, in contrast to the basically extensional and 
strictly deductive nature of traditional European logic. Here the question 
is not, ‘Given these premisses, what follows?’ but rather ‘How can we get 
the right premisses?’ And it is the function of the udaahara.na to establish 
them.
The premiss being sought is always a necessary relation; purely extensional 
or accidental universality, like ‘all chairs here are brown’ is not 
considered. This is already suggested by Pra"sastapaada and explicitly 
stated by Dharmakiirti. So this premiss, the general rule, must be a natural 
or metaphysical law.
The two kinds of example represent two complementary research strategies to 
find, confirm or reject such laws, e.g. there is no smoke without fire. 
Focusing our attention on smoky objects, we try to remember a case when 
there was no fire nearby; and then focusing on essentially non-fiery 
objects, we try to find a case when there was still some smoke there. The 
stock example is very suggestive. ‘As in the kitchen’ is clearly not a 
single case of co-occurrence of fire and smoke, but refers to innumerable 
observations, and furthermore the causal relation could also be easily 
observed there. ?Not as on the lake’ again suggests many observations, and 
also helps to clarify the concept of smoke – for there may be dhuuma on the 
lake, in the sense of ‘mist’.
Presenting this double strategy is a convincing way to prove a general law; 
and in a debate it is a fair offer to the opponent: try in both ways to find 
a counter-example! And if you can’t, then accept my rule.
In a real debate this could be a long and complicated process; that is why 
at the end it was very useful to recall the other premiss (there is smoke on 
the mountain) and the proposition (there is fire on the mountain) – since 
they were announced hours, perhaps days ago; and in the meantime the meaning 
of smoke has also become more definite, so we should now check if it was 
really smoke or only mist we saw.