This is a revised and enlarged version of my paper at the Boston Symposium on ‘Non-referring expressions in Nyāya and Buddhism’, at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, March, 1969. The papers were read in the following order: Karl Potter, Charlene McDermott, Bimal Matilal and Dalsukh Malvania. Unfortunately Prof. Malvania's paper is not ready yet for publication. We hope to publish it in a future issue of this journal. - Ed.
This nyaya-buddhist controversy over the empty subject term may well recall to a modern mind the meinong-russell controversy about 'existence' and 'denotation'. the nyaya and the buddhist logicians worried over the logical and the epistemological problem connected with the issue. the nyaya interpreted "the rabbit's horn" not as a singular term but as a predicate complex attributing 'hornness' to something that belonged to the rabbit. "the rabbit's horn does not exist" ascribes the absence of hornness to something belonging to a rabbit，and is true. this analysis is closer to russell's theory of description. the buddhist，on the other hand，is prepared to allow some sort of 'fictional existence' to "the rabbit's horn" which is perhaps not very different from meinong's 'theory of objects'. in epistemology the nyaya believed that any object of cognition (which is expressible in words) must be either real or analyzable into constituents which are ultimately identifiable with some real entity or other. (p.t.o.) only a complex object can be fictional. the buddhists, however，hold that the objects of erroneous cognition are fictional.
目次
I. NON-REFERRING EXPRESSIONS IN LANGUAGE 83 II. THE RIDDLE OF ‘NON-BEING’ 84 III. THE STATUS OF ‘EXAMPLE’ IN INDIAN LOGIC 86 IV. THE NYAYA-BUDDHIST CONTROVERSY 90 V. THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CONTROVERSY Let us consider 93 VI. THE IMPLICIT NYiYA SEMANTIC PRINCIPLE 96 VII. INTERPRETATION OF EXISTENCE AND NEGATION 98 VIII. THE PAN-FICTIONAL APPROACH OF BUDDHISM 102 APPENDIX A 103 APPENDIX B 107
