Before any philosophical school can argue productively about what is true, it needs a working theory of how truth can be known at all, a theory of pramana, valid means of knowledge. Indian philosophy developed this question with unusual explicitness, and the resulting disagreements between schools are as philosophically significant as the metaphysical conclusions those disagreements eventually produced. Most schools accepted pratyaksha, direct perception, and anumana, inference, as valid; the disputes concentrate on what else should be added to the list.
Nyaya accepted four pramanas: perception, inference, comparison, and shabda, verbal testimony, specifically the testimony of the Vedas and of reliable persons generally. Samkhya accepted only three, dropping comparison as a separate category. Mimamsa, concerned above all with correctly interpreting Vedic ritual injunctions, added arthapatti, postulation, reasoning to a necessary explanation from an otherwise inexplicable fact, and treated verbal testimony as an independent and irreducible source of knowledge rather than a form of inference from someone else’s report. The materialist Charvaka school, examined later in this series, accepted only direct perception, rejecting inference itself as unreliable, a position that placed it well outside the philosophical mainstream.
What is being negotiated in these disagreements is, in effect, the rules of admissible evidence for the entire subsequent philosophical enterprise. A school that accepts verbal testimony as an independent pramana can appeal to scripture as direct evidence for a metaphysical claim; a school that reduces testimony to inference has to justify scriptural claims indirectly, through the reasoning that a reliable speaker’s statement gives grounds for inferring the fact stated. These are not minor procedural differences. They determine what kind of argument a philosopher is even permitted to make.
This concern with epistemological ground rules, settled before substantive debate begins, is part of why Indian philosophy could sustain centuries of rigorous disagreement between schools without the disagreement collapsing into simple assertion and counter-assertion. Each school knew, and generally respected, what kind of evidence its opponents considered admissible, even while disputing the conclusions drawn from it, a discipline that produced one of the tradition’s most technically precise contributions, the formal structure of Indian logical argument developed by the Nyaya school, taken up next.
Part 28 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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