Apoha for Beginners

Abstract

AbstractThis study proposes, as an entryway into the complex debate about ‘exclusion’ (apoha) in Indian philosophy, that the main idea underlying Dignāga’s theory of apoha is that the relation between a word and its meaning—all the individuals that it can refer to—is established more by noticing what it is not used for than what it is used for. The Mīmāṃsā philosopher Kumārila raises a number of objections based on his construal of an apoha as a ‘non-existence’ (abhāva), but he also zeroes in on the problem of how, if apohas are known only by language and inference, they could ever be known at all. In this connection, he criticises Dignāga’s idea that the meaning of a word is learned by noticing that it is not used for things other than its usual referent. It seems, then, that much of what Dharmakīrti is doing in his discussion of apoha is to provide, in response to Kumārila, an account of how perceptual experiences of distinct particulars that have the same effects naturally give rise to an ascertainment of their exclusion from other entities, which can then be assigned as the meaning of an expression.