Ancient Indian Logic: A Pragmatist Appraisal

Much has been made of the cognitive and practical significance of ancient Indian logics. Logicians like Józef Maria Bocheński, and George Boole, and mathematicians like Augustus De Morgan, and Hermann Weyl, among others of their ilk have commented variously on the systematicity and richness of ancient Indian logics, and their orientation to natural langugage applications. Such commentary has often been construed as pro tanto evidence for the superiority of ancient Indian logic to ancient and modern Occidental logics. However, if these assessments are warranted, the sterility of ancient Indian logics with respect to technological applications, especially when contrasted with the unrivaled fecundity of Occidental mathematical logic in this domain, is [to put it mildly] a puzzling anomaly. If ancient Indian logics constitute the rich, systematic, and powerful, science they have been thought to constitute, one or more variants surely could [would] have made analogous and proportional contributions to digital logic design, and programming languages for instance, as have Occidental, mathematically articulated, logics. But given the paucity of such contributions, contrary to what one may legitimately expect from a science so lauded, the received assessments of Indian logic appear to be either well-intentioned but dubious, or insincere and false. One is inclined, on assessing the evidence, to accept the first disjunct of that dilemma. Now, if the potential for such contributions were always inherent in the discipline, and mere historical contingencies prevented their actualization, then it is conceivable that one or more iterations of ancient Indian logics can any day now become progenitor to some hitherto unforeseen applications. Thereby, such ancient Indian logics would be revealed to be fragments of the rich, systematic, and powerful science the received assessments of Occidental cognoscenti construe them to be. However, techniques for establishing the completeness/incompleteness, consistency/inconsistency, and expressive power of such logics would inevitably be derivative of modern, Occidental, mathematical logical techniques. Consequently, the praise accorded to ancient Indian logics would turn out to be anachronistic on pain of counting as praise directed towards something quite distinct from the alleged source logics that are the subjects of such assessments of completeness, consistency, and expressive power. Consider, as cases in point, the modern and mathematically informed work of R. Ramanujam, and Sundar Sarukkai on a Nyaya logic based ontology editor (2009, PP. 232-242), and Graham Priest on Buddhist logic. Accordingly, it appears that ancient Indian logics have never been constituents of the rich, systematic, and powerful science they have been thought to be. They may, however, be possessed of peculiar emphases, and original ideas, which may permit useful extrapolation