Introduction

Indian philosophical concerns with language were very much connected with the early development of Sanskrit linguistics. Indeed, the Sanskrit grammar of Pāṇini (fifth century bce) became a methodological paradigm for Indian philosophers in a way comparable to that in which Euclid's mathematical Elements became one for Western philosophers (see Staal 1988). Accordingly, some of the concerns of classical Indian philosophy of language are closely wedded to the peculiarities of the Sanskrit language. But Indian philosophers (and linguists) also concerned themselves with more general issues, particularly theories of meaning and the problem of universals. The very different metaphysical commitments of the different Indian philosophers meant that they espoused a wide range of views on topics like reference and existence, the relations between word-meaning and sentence-meaning, literal and metaphorical meaning, common nouns and universals, ineffability and the nature of the signification relation, and identity statements.

In Western philosophy two issues have traditionally been central to the philosophy of language. One is the relation between ourselves and our language; the other is the relation between our language and the world. The former topic is usually called pragmatics and the latter semantics (though the boundaries between the two are often blurred). Very roughly, pragmatics is concerned with the way in which context contributes to meaning, whereas semantics is concerned with the relation between signifiers (like words or sentences) and what they stand for. Indian philosophers addressed both topics, often in ways that are interestingly different from Western philosophers.

Relevant to pragmatics were the theories of linguistic understanding (śābdabodha) developed by the Indian philosophers, which specified the conditions for the understanding of the meaning of a sentence. These included knowledge of the speaker's intention (tātparyajñāna), which was agreed to be of special importance for the comprehension of meaning in cases where the expression used is ambiguous.

With respect to semantics, the Indian philosophers were unanimously direct referentialists about meaning: that is, they all thought of meanings as entities (artha) and identified the meaning of a linguistic expression with the external object denoted by the expression. (In other words, they did not posit sense as a component of the meaning of an expression in addition to its reference.) This general agreement, however, did not preclude vigorous debate about what sort of entity meanings should be identified with: particulars, generic properties, or both together.