报告题目：On the Navya-Nyāya Contribution to a Logic of Questions

报告人：Eberhard Guhe  复旦哲学院副教授

报告时间：2018年5月16日 15:00-17:00

报告地点：复旦大学光华楼西主楼2801报告厅

Personal Information: Eberhard Guhe is an associate professor at the School of Philosophy of Fudan University, where he teaches Indian philosophy, modern logic and Sanskrit. He studied at the Universities of Münster (Germany) and Vienna (Austria) and holds a master's degree and a PhD in Indology from the University of Vienna. His academic work is focused on the study of various topics of classical Indian philosophy (especially logic) in relation to contemporary philosophical problems.

Abstract: In 1891 Maheśa Chandra published his Brief Notes on the Modern Nyāya System of Philosophy and its Technical Terms (BN), a primer on the terminology and doctrines of a branch in Indian philosophy called “Navya-Ny膩ya”. Despite its English title BN is a Sanskrit work. In the final section the author deals with “certitude” (ni艣caya) and “doubt” (sa峁兣沘ya) as the two varieties of “cognition” (jñ膩na). He illustrates the verbal expression of certitudes by means of declaratives and the verbal expression of doubts by means of interrogatives (functioning as polar or alternative questions). He notes also that different credence levels might be associated with the alternatives involved in a speaker’s doubt. A biassed question in the form of a tag interrogative might be an appropriate way to express such a doubt.
In Western logic the idea to treat declaratives and interrogatives on a par, which is anticipated by the Navya-Naiy膩yikas' use of the unifying concept of “cognition”, goes back to Frege’s distinction between the semantic content (the “thought”) of a sentence and its force and it was recently elaborated by Ciardelli, Farkas, Groenendijk, Roelofsen et al., the founders of a new branch in logic called “inquisitive logic”. In the present talk we will discuss Mahe艣a Chandra's exposition of the Navya-Naiy膩yikas' innovative approach from the perspective of this type of logic.