Negative Facts, Bertrand Russell and Empty Talk

 Negative facts bothered cerebrotonic ectomorph Bertrand Russell.  What sort of acquaintance could you have with them.  His nature abhorred a vacuum.  There was a fine fat emptiness where a fact should be, and not just any fact but one which the Nyaya folk called yogyata or pertinent.  There are an infinite number of items nameable and knowable, just not here in this room, but.  The elephant not in the room was Bertrand’s elephant and he wanted it out of there and in his stall of knowledge.

Bertrand, you are very greatly mistaken if you think that the non-apprehension of the existence of Jumbo is a piece of knowledge.  It is a means of knowledge and it informs your search.  It tells you to look elsewhere.  Can there be a distinction between a means of knowledge and knowledge itself?  Spectacles and what you see with them.  A walking stick and ambulation.  It would seem you can.  Of course those are just analogies, single use conceptual ‘burners’.

Can Jumbo’s absence be translated as ‘It is true that there is no elephant here’.  You have steered away from facts.  Do such locutions make any difference to the order of things that are in this room.  Is it an improvement?  C.K. Ogden in his ‘Meaning of Meaning’ writes that whether they are tied with clear string or knotted parcels are just ‘honest parcels’.

“When we dispute as to whether a fact is positive or negative, or whether there are ‘negative facts’ we are engaged merely in the criticism of rival prose styles.”

J.N. Findlay and the Non-Apprehension of Existence (anupalabadhi)

I’m reading J.N. Findlay’s The Discipline of the Cave his Gifford Lectures of 1965 and enjoying it. He lays about him with vigorous eloquence the timid orthodoxy of the day namely ‘ordinary language’ and ‘analysis’. Here he defends what the Vedantin would call anupalabadhi or the non-apprehension of existence as a valid means of knowledge.

 There can, it may be argued, be no negative facts: this does not prove that Mother Hubbard and her dog did not encounter a most distressing negative phenomenon when they opened the cupboard, which admits neither of metaphysical nor psychological reduction. Heidegger's withers are unwrung by all those sunny analyses which prove that nothing, or the total absence of anything, is not a genuine object, and that it is not therefore possible to feel dread in the face of it. Nothing or the total absence of anything is a genuine object of contemplation and of varied emotional attitudes—much of the exquisite culture of Japan, for instance, seems to be built around it—and it is much more certain that this is so than that some piece of analysis is a correct one. 

Dormitive Explanation of anupalabadhi in the Nyaya Kusumanjali of Udayana

[If you ask “how can abhava (non-existence) be an object of sense perception at all,” we reply] that its sense-perception is possible bacause the relation between the eye and its object, which is necessary in every act of perception, is here fulfilled (in the case of an absent jar,) at second hand by the relation between the spot of ground and the said absence, which we call the distinguishing relation.

(from Nyaya Kusumanjali by Udayana) )

This seems to be another dormitive explanation. Not being seen at a certain locus is due to the special relationship of not being seen at that location which pertains to that object and the locus.

Note on Non-Apprehension of Existence in Nyaya Manjari

A pramana has been defined as a means of valid knowledge. One of the means of valid knowledge that has been accepted by advaita vedanta and rejected by the Nyaya school is that of anupalabadhi. The standard example is – 'There is no jar on the floor'. This is interpreted as non-apprehension of existence by Swami Madhavananda in Vedanta Paribhasa(trans) and as non-perception by Janaki Vallabha Bhattacharyya in Nyaya Manjari(trans). This divergence is the crux of their disagreement. I find the justification of the pramana in V.P. to be sound but incomplete and its rejection in N.M. not convincing but nevertheless raising some interesting points.

The Nyaya position has an intuitive immediacy. Not seeing the jar on the floor is a matter of simple perception. The visual input does not include a jar. Agreed says the Vedantin you are seeing something viz.the floor and at that locus you do not see a jar. This non-apprehension is an instrument of knowledge or a means of knowledge. Here I venture my own interpretation of this point. Clearly a non-apprehension cannot be a means of knowledge of itself or an otiose, pointless self-referential observation. What then is its informational content? Must it not be related to a context of expectation? You were told that there was a jar on the floor in the kitchen. On going there you don't see one and make the canonical report.

Then there was the case of the dog that did not bark in the night-time.

- Look at the ceiling' I said to my wife, what do you not see?
- Puzzled, she replied, what am I looking for?
- Water.
- You mean you fixed the leak in the shower stall upstairs.

(domestic fiction)

Jayanta Bhatta mentions in Nyaya Manjari similar real situations with a context of non-apprehension.

Happiness or sorrow arises in the absence of a foe or of a friend. A man places his feet on the way seeing the absence of a thorn on it. A man is earnest to search for the material of a jar if he finds that no jar has come into being. A man refrains from taking medicine when he realises that he is free from disease. No thoughtful man can deny objective existence to negation having noticed that it actually exists and many worldly transactions are based on it.

(pg.124/160 adobe pdf)

A Link to the Missing

Following through on a link... yes I know, I also read manuals; I came to ‘this page doesn’t seem to exist’. That set me off. Can a nonentity seem to do anything, particularly exist? Only, I think, if its existence is camouflaged so perfectly that it is not apparent. Its non-existence lies so perfectly, sublimely, congruent with reality. Its nonness is an onness as it were. The which it is. This you see is an example of the pramana (valid means of knowledge) known as anupalabadhi i.e. non-apprehension of existence. I expected to click to something, a background of purported existence was established which was flouted. I acquired a non-perceptual knowledge for it is clear that I cannot see what isn’t there. There is a Nyaya school which claims that this knowledge is an inference anuamana (pramana) from a non-perception but it seems to me that an inference even if Sherlockian fast is contrary to the immediacy of this knowledge.

Absence makes the mind to ponder.

Vaidya on Anupalabadhi

I spent about one and a half hours reading this interviewhindu syllogisms
and that I suppose gives me the right to comment on it. I have, so to speak, paid my way – the way of the internet savant.

I’ve said this before about Sanskrit and Sanskritism. Poetry is what is lost in translation. If a philosophical text cannot be translated it is not philosophy. Philosophy is what is retained in translation. Do you really have to know French to understand the ‘evil demon’ hypothesis? Does not knowing German put the ‘thing in itself’ out of your reach?

I went to India in 2018 to speak to some very respected Mīmāṃsā scholars who debated in Sanskrit aspects of Mīmāṃsā theory of knowledge (pramāṇa). My hope is that by talking to these learned scholars who train in Sanskrit for most of their lives from a very young age, I might figure out more about the nature of non-apprehension (anupalabadhi).

Vaidya might well have read about the non-apprehension of existence in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness pub.1943 (Chap.1:Section 2) (find the book at:
being and nothingness

I have an appointment with Pierre at four o'clock. I arrive at the cafe a quarter of an hour late. Pierre is always punctual. Will he have waited for me? I look at the room, the patrons, and I say, "He is not here." Is there an intuition of Pierre's absence, or does negation indeed enter in only with judgment? At first sight it seems absurd to speak here of intuition since to be exact there could not be an intuition of nothing and since the absence of Pierre is this nothing. Popular consciousness, however, bears witness to this intuition. Do we not say, for example, "I suddenly saw that he was not there." Is this just a matter of misplacing the negation? Let us look a little closer.

Further on in his masterly exposition:

This figure which slips constantly between my look and the solid, real objects of the cafe is precisely a perpetual disappearance; it is Pierre raising himself as nothingness on the ground of the nihilation of the cafe. So that what is offered to intuition is a flickering of nothingness; it is the nothingness of the ground, the nihilation of which summons and demands the appearance of the figure, and it is the figure-the nothingness which slips as a nothing to the surface of the ground. It serves as foundation for the judgment-"Pierre is not here." It is in fact the intuitive apprehension of a double nihilation.

There are differences to the anupalabadhi pramana but the core intuition is there. The central point of claiming anupaladhi (non-apprehension of existence) as a pramana is that it is a valid means of knowledge that cannot be reduced to any other.

I see that I have come to the end of a page which is quite enough for now. I might have more to say on Vaidya on the topic of disjunctivism (argument from illusion) later.

One thing else: the example given of anupalabadhi – ‘the pot is not on the floor’ only goes on all fours if you have the background knowledge of the universal presence of an earthen water pot on every Indian floor in olden times. Its not being there is an immediate knowledge.

Non-Apprehension of Existence as a Means of Knowledge - Anupalabdhi

The landscape of the pramana anupalabdhi accepted by Advaita is a strange one lit up by flashes of understanding. As ever negation is the way to knowledge. The Nyaya school do not accept non-apprehension of existence as a distinct valid means of knowledge holding that it is based on perception.

First though the positive thesis. Here I follow the line laid down by the Vedanta Paribhasa by Dharmaraja Adhvarindra. Put at its simplest it may seem otiose. Looking at a cleared table I can say ‘there is no jug on the table’. There is a non-apprehension of the existence of a jug. This is different from perception in that I cannot perceive what isn’t there. There is no non-jug that I perceive to be not there. I can further add that if there was a jug on the table I would see it. Only perceptible things are of interest here even if the pramana is not based on perception. It is claimed to be an immediate knowledge not delivered by sense perception. It proceeds direct to the mind.

It might be claimed that a vast number of things that are perceptible and tableable are not there so there is very little value in such information. That’s true but it is not the information but the means that is at issue. In any case this pramana is useful when we notice the absence of something that should be there. The book that was on the table is not there when I go to look for it. If the restaurant manager tells the waiter that ‘there is no water on the table’ that non-apprehension of existence is a direction to action.

My previous remarks on this topic can be found by putting ‘anupalabadhi’ in the search box. Notice the incorrect spelling - without spellcheck my English spelling would be no better.