Abstract

The vexed issue of the precise connection between words and things has been a major preoccupation over the centuries summoning the resources of metaphysics, philosophy of language, linguistics, ontology and increasingly semiological analysis. Philosophy in India produced a number of different and often conflicting solutions, only to be rivalled by an equally bewildering variety witnessed in the ancient and modern West. I want to bring to the foreground the late Professor Bimal K. Matilal’s development of Nyaya-Vaisesika realist approach to the aporia, and interject the analysis with dissident voices, especially of Mimamsakas and Buddhists. Significantly, it will be the living ghosts of Putnam and Dummett that I will invoke to haunt Matilal’s variation on metaphysical realism. Matilal veered closer to a realist metaphysic, which is inflected in his own formulation of a theory of language appropriate to this ontology, this despite his idealized attraction to phenomenalist-constructivism ; his flirtations with Bhartrharian holism and lately with Derridean deconstruction in his epiloquia. But my critique focuses on his famous earlier analysis of Jnana or cognition and his defence of a particular linguistic-ontology within a narrowly circumscribed naturalized epistemology.