In classical Hindu philosophy and classical Indian thought more generally, questions of epistemology, rationality, and public debate were typically framed in terms of pramāṇas, “means of knowing.” The term pramāṇa is sometimes used to refer to cognition itself, especially by Buddhist interlocutors, but more commonly pramāṇa refers to processes or causes of veridical cognition such as perception, inference, and testimony. Hindu thinkers were concerned with identifying and understanding such processes for two major reasons: first, they thought that an individual’s well-being depended on navigating the world effectively, which in turn depended on understanding it properly. As such, achieving life goals hinged on cognitive success. Understanding what sort of processes lead to knowledge as opposed to ignorance or doubt was crucial to sustained cognitive success and hence living well. Second, schools of thought and praxis had to defend their views and ways of life in the culture of robust debate pervading classical Indian intellectual life. Illustrating that one’s view or perspective was indeed supported by genuine pramāṇas, and that their opponent’s view was not, was one way to do this. Pramāṇas were thus often crucial to debates about fundamental questions in philosophy, as well as theology and ethics. And these questions were deeply tied to concerns about the best way to live. By way of example, for Mīmāṃsā, the need to defend the ultimate moral and religious authority of the Veda motivates them to develop a sophisticated epistemology of default justification for cognition, which is then applied to the Vedic testimony. For Nyāya, defending the existence of the self against Buddhist challengers leads to myriad inferences in support of its existence; these are held to be binding, as properly formed inference is a widely recognized pramāṇa. Articulating what constitutes a well-formed inference is then the basis of Nyāya developments in logic and the epistemology of inferential cognition. Vedāntic thinkers are both concerned with defending the Upaniṣadic literature (and denigrating yogic experience) as a source of knowledge of brahman, and characterizing the state of the deep self as a witness to the events of consciousness. In short, Hindu thinkers are deeply concerned with identifying, analyzing, and engaging in debate over what sorts of processes are basic irreducible means of knowing and how such processes generate epistemic normativity.
In this paper, I examine Kumārila Bhaṭṭa's account of figurative language in Tantravārttika 1. 4.11-17, arguing that, for him, both metonymy (lakṣaṇā) and metaphor (gauṇa-vṛtti) IntroductionRoman Jakobson and Morris Halle argue in Fundamentals of Language that there are two relationships which form the foundation of language use, not only in the individual speaker, but in a wider sense, as the basis of genres such as poetry and prose. 1 These relationships are similarity and contiguity, which Jakobson and Helle characterize as the basis of metaphor and metonymy, respectively, though they lament the theoretical preoccupation with metaphor in contrast to metonymy. In his 2010 lecture to Harvard University, Sanskritist and linguist Edwin Gerow suggests that Indian philosophy should force us to re-examine the thesis of this now-classic paper. Demonstrating that the twin poles of metaphor and metonymy were well-established in Indian poetics and philosophy, Gerow observes that, in contrast to the predominance of metaphor in Western thought, Indian linguistic analysis has theories focusing strongly on metonymy. He argues that their emphasis on the objective nature of figurative language is "unparalleled and deserves to be noted in any account of theories of language." 2 Gerow is correct, and in this paper, I focus on the basis of this objective nature in the Mīmāṃsā or "Hermeneutics" tradition of Indian philosophical thought, in particular the work of seventh century CE thinker Kumarila Bhaṭṭa. 3 For Kumarila, linguistic interpretation involves a cognitive process which draws connections between concepts without appeal to speaker intention, but through compositional and contextual elements, and by which we can come to have knowledge of what is meant by a sentence in context. This cognitive process is knowledge-conducive-thus having an objective nature as Gerow suggests-and underwrites metonymy and metaphor, which turn out to be pervasive in language.One ordinary example will illustrate these two phenomena. Suppose I were to say about my morning cup of coffee,
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