Language and Reality: On an Episode in Indian Thought

Abstract

The following work is based on a series of lectures delivered before the Section des Sciences Religieuses at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sorbonne, Paris) in May 1997. I had addressed the main sub-ject of these lectures before on other occasions, but never on this scale.1The lectures in Paris gave me the opportunity to present the historical background of my subject, which I call the correspondence principle, as well as examples of its many manifestations. Not even a series of lectures, however, could do justice to the subject, and what follows is far from exhaustive. Ideas and intuitions about the relationship between language and reality abounded in classical India, and a full understanding of all their aspects, all their expressions, and the net-works of thought connecting them together is still a distant goal.