Sabdapramana in Indian Philosophy

Contents: Foreword. Editorial note. 1. Nyaya Theory of Linguistic Communication/V.N. Jha. 2. Akanksa: the Nyaya view and its criticism by Vyasatirtha/D. Prahlada Char. 3. Knowledge of identity: an Indian perspective/Sukharanjan Saha. 4. Knowledge from trusted tellings and its preventers/Arindam Chakraborty. 5. Some alternative definitions of Sabdapramana/Prabal Kumar Sen. 6. Eternality of word-meaning relation vis-a-vis contextuality: the Bhartrharian perspective/Tandra Patnaik. 7. Independence of Sabdapramana (Testimony as autonomous source of knowledge)/R.I. Ingalalli. 8. Prasamsita Vakya/Ratna Dutta Sharma. 9. Scope and limits of Sruti as a Pramana: perspectives from Purva Mimamsa and Advaita Vedanta/G. Mishra. 10. The genesis of a verbal cognition and the temporal sequence of its antecedents/Gangadhar Kar. 11. The Advaita Theory of Sabdaparoksatva: is it Testimonial or Perceptual?/Raghunath Ghosh. 12. Concept of Sphota in Bhartrhari/Jyotish Ch. Basak. 13. \'Apta\' -- some sceptical questions/Bhaswati Bhattacharya Chakrabarti. Index. List of contributors.

"The present book highlights the importance of verbal testimony (sabdapramana\'s) in Indian Epistemology, knowledge from trusted telling, eternality of word and its meaning, its non-reducibility to inference, philosophical significance of praiseworthy sentence, limits of sruti as a Pramana perceptual cognition generated through verbal testimony, notion of aptatva, etc. These issues are freshly interpreted by a team of scholars who are engaged in research on this subject for a considerable period of time." (jacket)