citation of examples was given at least as much prominence as the citation of
reasons. When the Nya ̄ya theory of inference was “rediscovered” by Henry Cole-
brooke (he broke the news at a meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society in London
in 1824), the Indologists of the day in their excitement failed to pay due atten-
tion to this fact, and were led to some rather extraordinary speculations about
the origins of syllogistic theory. The Sanskritist Görres apparently arrived at the
view that Alexander, having been in conversation with the logicians of India
during his campaigns, sent some of their treatises back home to his tutor who
worked them up into a system! Equally remarkable was Niebuhr’s claim that the
Indians must have derived their theory from the Indianized Greeks of Bactria (it
is a view Vidhyabhusana was to repeat much later on). If there is a lesson here,
it is that a little comparative philosophy is a dangerous thing.
The debating room is a theater for the art of persuasion. It is a metaphor for
any situation in which one wants to persuade others of the correctness of one’s
point of view. It will include by extension both the mundane situation of per-
suading one’s companion that something is about to happen, and persuading a
scientific or academic community of the truth of one’s thesis. The model of ratio-
nality which comes out of the theory of debate is public, explicit, demonstra-
tional. The norms of public reason are those of mutual agreement.
The proper way to formulate one’s position is in accordance with a “five-
limbed” schema: tentative statement of the thesis to be proved; citation of a
reason; mention of an example; application of reason and example to the
case in hand; final assertion of the thesis (NS 1.1.32). Suppose I want to per-
suade my walking companion that it is about to rain. I might reason as fol-
lows: “Look, it is going to rain. For see that large black cloud. Last time you
saw a large black cloud like that one, what happened? Well, it’s the same now.
It is definitely going to rain.” In order to be able to generalize the structure of
such patterns of reasoning, the Naiya ̄yikas make an important simplifying
assumption. They assume that the underlying pattern is one of property-
substitution. The claim is that all such patterns exemplify the same canonical
form: Ta becauseRa. An objent (the paks.aor “site” of the inference) is inferred
to have a property (the sa ̄dhya or “target”) on the grounds that it has some other
property (the hetuor reason). The first simplification, then, is to think of rea-
soning as taking us from an object’s having one property to that same object’s
having another.
The simplification scarcely seems justified. A cursory inspection of the cases
mentioned at the beginning of the last section shows that only about half fit such
a pattern. The cases of the swollen river, the ants, the peacock’s cry, the fruit,
and the salty sea do not seem to fit at all. Neither can we fit reasoning to the
remainder by elimination. The canonical schema seems to fit the case of the
moon, the pregnancy, and the child’s special mark, but it is only at a stretch that
one can force the case of smoke and fire into the pattern (an irony as this is a
hackneyed example which all the logical texts quote). Bearing in mind the ways
in which Indian logic was later to develop, one can be forgiven for feeling that
this adoption of a property-substitution model at an early stage, while perhaps
432 jonardon ganeri