Gavaya: Very like a cow Kumarila

I feel like the detective that turns on his way out the door and says: - There’s one thing that bothering me. Why choose a complex illustration for the upamana pramana if all you had in mind was plain similarity? Why the tuppence coloured cow and gavaya, and the knowledgeable forester etc, etc. Why not offer what everyone can understand eg. a similar design, a similar fate, a similar frock, a book with a similar theme etc. If not, why not? 

 My tentative sense of these ready to hand examples is that they involve unitary instances. One hammer is much like any other qua hammer even though there are many kinds with specialised functions; ball pein, cross pein, claw etc.

 Kumarila in Slokavarttika dismisses the idea of ‘twins’ as an exemplar of similarity because there we see that they are. (22/3 pg.226 Jha trans.) The moment you utter the word ‘twin’ you admit similarity, it is not something that you might discover about twins or peas.

In a case where we have the recognition of a single class as belonging to the principle objects themselves (and not to the parts), there we have a notion (of identity) such as “this is that very thing”; and where there is difference, there we have the notion of Similarity only.

When the person roaming in the forest sees a strange animal, he perceives the beast. At one and the same time he is aware of its ‘cowness’and that it is a gavaya. That is the upamana. To put it portentously we are moving towards a scientifically actionable knowledge of genus and species. 

Kumarila Bhatta on Upamana in Slokavarttika

Bhatta in his Slokavarttika hunts the gavaya out of his forest home into the broad pasture of rational discourse. I mean by that his very full treatment of the pramana known as upamana or analogy/comparison. The view that he controverts is that the Naiyayika school which does not allow that upamana is a pramana. In this note I want to focus on what his positive thesis is.

The fact of "Similarity" (or Resemblance) being a positive entity, however, cannot be denied ; inasmuch as according to them, there exists (or Resemblance) being a positive inasmuch as it consists of the presence, in one class of objects, of such an arrangement (or conglomeration) of constituent parts as is common to another class of objects.

. (18: pg.225) It is not just the discovery of likeness in constituent parts that makes upamana a basic valid means of knowledge, what matters is the identification of what draws together any number of classes which I understand as the discovery of their genus.

And Similarity differs from the {classes) in that it rests upon a conglomeration of classes whereas the classes appear also severally among objects of Sense-perception.

Here Bhatta is disputing the claim that Similarity/Upamana is merely a matter of sense perception or what is termed extraordinary perception which descries similarity or universals in the sensory data pur sang. Ganganatha Jha the translator of this work offers a clarificatory footnote to the discussion whether Upamana might not be a case of inference. Similarity is 'in the cow' and naturally the cow is not present to sense perception in the classical example.

It is the similarity, in the cow, of the gavaya, that is the true object of Analogy ; whereas that which is perceived by the eye is the similarity as located in the gavaya ; and the latter could not give rise to any Inference that would bring about any idea of the similarity in the cow.

(fn.44/45 )