Five Inferences on the Blackboard: Diagnosing Hetvabhasa in a Jaipur Classroom
A lecturer in Jaipur writes five inferences on the board and gives her 42 students the whole period to mark each one either sad-hetu (valid) or as one of the fallacies they have studied. She offers no hints and collects the sheets at the bell. The five are:
(i) The hill has fire, because it has smoke. (ii) Sound is eternal, because it is produced. (iii) The hill has fire, because it is knowable. (iv) Sound is non-eternal, because it is visible. (v) Fire is cold, because it is a substance.
A parent later complains that (iii) has a true conclusion and should therefore be marked correct, and that (iv) is meaningless rather than fallacious. Two students have marked (v) as savyabhicara instead of badhita and want their marks restored. The lecturer must publish a defensible key, justify the marking of (iii) and (iv), and settle the (v) dispute. She has one class period, and the textbook lists the five hetvabhasas without giving examples.
1. Supply the key: label each of the five and state the feature of the hetu that fixes the label.
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The key, with the reason in each case:
- (i) valid (sad-hetu). Smoke is present in the hill (pakshadharmata), occurs wherever fire occurs (sapaksha-sattva, as in a kitchen), and is absent where fire is absent (vipaksha-vyavrittita, as in a lake).
- (ii) viruddha. Being produced is pervaded by non-eternality, so the hetu occupies exactly the place where the sadhya is absent; it proves the contradictory of what is claimed.
- (iii) savyabhicara (anaikantika). Knowability is too wide: it occurs in a pot, where there is no fire, and in the hill, so no vyapti can be stated and the hetu deviates.
- (iv) asiddha. Sound is not visible at all, so the first condition, pakshadharmata, fails before any question of pervasion arises.
- (v) badhita. Coldness is stultified by the touch-perception of fire, and no restriction of the vyapti can rescue a conclusion already known to be false.
One caution to add on the board. The labels are not exclusive. (v) also has a deviating hetu, since substancehood covers hot and cold things alike. That overlap is the substance of the next dispute.
2. Answer the parent's two complaints: that (iii) has a true conclusion and so should be marked correct, and that (iv) is meaningless rather than fallacious.
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On (iii): a true conclusion is being confused with a valid inference. Nyaya treats validity as a property of the hetu - its presence in the paksha, its presence in sapakshas, its absence in vipakshas - not a property of the sentence concluded. 'The hill has fire because it is knowable' would let one conclude anything from anything: the same hetu would prove that the hill has water. A conclusion that happens to be true but is reached by a deviating hetu gives no guarantee, and a class that marks it correct has learned to guess rather than to infer. The mark should stand.
On (iv): 'meaningless' and 'fallacious' are different verdicts. The sentence is well formed and its conclusion is intelligible; what fails is the first condition of a hetu, since visibility never occurs in sound. An asiddha hetu is a determinate mistake with a name and a repair - one can say exactly what the speaker would have to establish - whereas a meaningless string teaches nothing. Marking it as a fallacy rather than dismissing it is the more informative response, and it is the reason the exercise uses invented examples rather than only textbook ones.
3. Settle the dispute about (v): are the two students who wrote savyabhicara right, and how should the lecturer mark?
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Both markings identify a real defect; they differ over which defect to name. Substancehood does occur in things that are cold and in things that are not, so the hetu genuinely deviates and the label savyabhicara is not a fiction. But the conclusion 'fire is cold' is directly stultified by touch, and that is the more fundamental trouble: no upadhi, no restriction of the vyapti, can save a sadhya already known to be false. Nyaya therefore classifies such cases as badhita and treats the deviation as secondary.
How the lecturer should settle it. She should state which convention her textbook follows, then mark by reason rather than by label. A student who wrote savyabhicara but explained that the conclusion is contradicted by perception has shown the understanding the question tests, and full credit is defensible. A student who wrote badhita without noticing the deviating hetu has the right answer for half the reason. Marks should be restored only in the first case, and the class should be told why the distinction between a defect in the hetu and a defect in the sadhya is worth keeping: the first can sometimes be repaired by specifying an upadhi, the second cannot be repaired at all.