Meaning, Understanding, and Knowing-what: An Indian Grammarian Notion of Intuition (Pratibhā)

Abstract

For Bhartṛhari, a fifth-century philosopher of the Indian Grammarian (Vaiyākaraṇika) school, all conscious beings-beasts, birds and humans-are capable of what he called pratibhā, a flash of indescribable intuitive understanding such that one knows what the present object "means" and what to do with it. Contemporary scholars writing on pratibhā generally translate the Sanskrit term as "intuition," not in the sense understood by many analytical philosophers as an a priori judgment appealed to in thought experiments to test philosophical hypotheses, but in the sense of a spontaneously arising awareness that is immediate, reliable, indescribable, and pregnant with meaning. Significantly, our instantaneous understanding of a sentence or complete utterance already counts as an instance of pratibhā. Given that to understand a sentence is to know its meaning, such an understanding, if correct, amounts to a mode of knowing that may best be termed knowing-what, to distinguish it from both knowing-that and knowing-how. This essay attempts to expound Bhartṛhari's conception of pratibhā in relation to the notions of meaning, understanding, and knowing laid out in his magnum opus, the Vākyapadīya (henceforth VP). 1 The conception is philosophically intriguing and contemporarily relevant. Yet, it has not hitherto been subjected to a systematic analytical philosophical treatment. 2 Here, I hope to fill this lacuna. Now, to offer a broadly coherent and focused philosophical analysis, I shall neglect the metaphysical and presumably exotic aspects of the conception. My overall purpose is to provide a rational reconstruction of Bhartṛhari's empirical thought on pratibhā to suggest its relevance for contemporary studies of related topics. I identify three different yet interrelated notions of pratibhā: intuitive meaning, intuitive understanding, and knowing-what. The remainder of the essay deals with each in turn. In "Intuitive Meaning," I touch briefly on Bhartṛhari's views of consciousness and language, and examine at some length his indescribability thesis concerning the intuitive meaning of a sentence. In "Intuitive Understanding," I delineate the general features of pratibhā as intuitive understanding and discuss its probable range in relation to expert intuition and sense perception. Thereafter, in "Knowingwhat," I relate pratibhā to the notion of knowing-what and show why these two notions are to be differentiated from knowing-that and knowing-how. I conclude