DOUBLE NEGATION IN BUDDHIST LOGIC*
Enroute to this conference i , I met three nominalists. Bearing in mind that our general topic was metaphysics and logic, it occurred to me to enlist some help from these paragons of metaphysical discipline. What I found, remarkably enough, was that their common metaphysical position (or perhaps one should say, their common anti-metaphysical position) branched out in three very different semantical directions. While they all agreed ontologically, to the extent of disavowing abstract entities of all sorts, each of them embraced a different semantics. The juxtaposition of their views was interesting to me, and it was a revelation for them, because it showed how the interaction of ontology and semantics coloured their whole philosophical outlook and even influenced their prospects for a balanced philosophical life.
My first traveling companion, the one I think of as the happy nominalist, rigorously carried over his nominalism from ontology into semantics, to the point where he had a uniform overall philosophy: a nominalist ontology coupled with an equally nominalist semantics. My second companion was an unhappy nominalist, with a split philosophy. He found that language imposed upon him unacceptable ontological commitments; for he was a nominalist in ontology but a naive realist in semantics. My third companion, who might be called the resourceful nominalist, had managed somehow to accomodate his metaphysical scruples to the ontological liberality of ordinary language and naive semantics. He promised to explain later how he had worked it out.
Our discussion made us all aware of a general phenomenon, the problem of reconciling and balancing ontology and semantics. It was hardly a new discovery, and certainly not a new problem. Indeed, it seemed to have direct application to some puzzling aspects of Buddhist logic, especially to the role of double negation in the Buddhist doctrine of apoha. The conjecture I propose to develop locates the apoha doctrine within a philosophical tradition of resourceful nominalism.
From what I have been able to learn from the English literature, the Buddhist theory of negation was a many-sided doctrine of interwoven strands, some of which deserve separate treatment quite apart from narrowly