Prabhākara

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Prabhākara (active c. 7th century) was an Indian philosopher-grammarian in the Mīmāṃsā tradition. His views and his debate with Kumārila Bhaṭṭa led to the Prābhākara school within Mimamsa.

Śālikanātha wrote commentaries on Prabhākara in the 8th century.^[1]

Sentence vs Word meaning

One of the views of the prābhākaras is that words do not directly designate meaning; any meaning that arises is because it is connected with other words (anvitābhidhāna, anvita = connected; abhidhā = denotation). We know or learn the meaning of a word only by considering the sentential context which it appears; we learn such word meanings together with their possible semantic connections with other words. Sentence meanings are grasped directly, from perceptual and contextual cues, skipping the stage of grasping singly the individual word meanings (Matilal 1990:108).

This is very similar to the modern view of linguistic underspecification, and relates to the Dynamic Turn in Semantics, which opposes the purely compositional view of arriving at sentence meaning.

The prābhākarakas were opposed by the bhāṭṭakas, who argued for a compositional view of semantics (called abhihitānvaya). In this view, the meaning of a sentence was understood only after understanding first the meanings of individual words. Words were independent, complete objects, a view that is close to the Fodorian view of language.

See also

• Triputipratyaksavada (Prabhakara's Doctrine of Triple Perception)
• Khyativada
• Anubhava (Hindu thought)

References

• Matilal, Bimal Krishna (1990). The word and the world: India's contribution to the study of language. Oxford University Press. 
• Giovanni Ciotti; Alastair Gornall; Paolo Visigalli (31 January 2014). Puspika: Tracing Ancient India Through Texts and Traditions. Oxbow Books. ISBN 978-1-78297-416-1. 

1. ↑ Paolo Visigalli 2014, p. 47.