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What is apoha, and how can a word mean something by excluding everything else?

Kavya Menon Fellow
· 4 replies · 202 views
Meaning & languageBuddhistIndianMimamsaDharmakīrtiDignāgaFerdinand de SaussureKumārila Bhaṭṭa#apoha#buddhist-philosophy-of-language#nominalism#universals
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I'm a poet and new to formal philosophy, so please be gentle. In a seminar on translation someone mentioned that the Buddhist philosopher Dignāga held that the word “cow” means something like “not non-cow”. Everyone nodded. I laughed, because it sounded like a riddle, and then realised nobody else was laughing.

I'd like to understand it properly. How can a word get its meaning by excluding things? Surely to exclude the non-cows I already need to know what a cow is? And why would anyone take that route instead of the obvious one, that “cow” refers to cows?

One more thing. In my literature course we read Saussure, who says that in language there are only differences. Is apoha the same idea from a different century, or am I being misled by a resemblance?

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Accepted answer

  1. Meera Kulkarni

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Buddhist epistemologists, Dignāga and later Dharmakīrti, deny that there are real universals. There's no “cowness” sitting in every cow. What's real are particulars, each unique. But words are general: “cow” applies to millions of different animals. So what does it pick out, if not a shared universal?

    Dignāga's answer is anyāpoha, exclusion of the other. A word works by ruling out what it doesn't apply to. “Cow” draws a boundary against non-cows rather than pointing to a common essence.

    Your circularity worry is the famous objection, and Dharmakīrti tried to meet it. On his account, different particulars come to be grouped because they produce similar effects in us and serve similar purposes, even though nothing is literally shared. His example: many different herbs all reduce fever, without any “fever-reducing-ness” in them. The grouping rests on causal facts about particulars, not on a prior concept of cow.

    On Saussure: there's a family resemblance, since both make meaning depend on contrast. But Saussure is describing how a language as a system produces value from differences between signs. Apoha is a nominalist theory about how general words relate to a world of unique particulars. Same shape, different question.

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Other answers

  1. Govinda Prasad Mishra

    Fellow

    Let me give you the opposition, since my tradition supplied much of it. Kumārila, the great Mīmāṃsaka, attacked apoha at length. His core point is yours, Kavya: to exclude non-cows you must already identify cows, so exclusion presupposes the positive concept it was meant to replace. For Mīmāṃsā, universals are real and the relation between a word and its meaning is not invented by anyone. The Naiyāyikas pressed similar objections. The Buddhist replies were refined over centuries precisely because these critics were so good.

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  2. Kavya Menon

    Fellow

    Thank you, both. I think I see why I laughed: I heard it as a definition, and it's really a theory of why definitions never quite catch the particular. Every love poem I've written fails to say what she is and only rules out what she is not. Perhaps Dignāga would understand poets better than I thought.

  3. Oskar Nyberg

    Fellow

    For readers coming from the European side: the closest analogue is medieval nominalism. Ockham also denied that universals are things shared by many, and treated general terms as signs naturally standing for many individuals. The Buddhist logicians got there by a different route and, I think, worked out the semantics in more detail.

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