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The objection to inference may be reformulated in other ways, focussing attention, for instance, on the fallible perceptual component of the universal relation (vyaptisambandha), viz., a priori (from cause to effect, from clouds to rain), a posteriori (from effect to cause, from swollen river to rain) and '[un] commonly seen' traits (from horns of beast to its having a tail).⁹ Only probabilistic or statistical forms of inference having no obvious perceptual compo­nent in them can perhaps avoid this objection.¹⁰

But in the Indian tradition of logic-cum-epistemology one does not come across what may be called purely formal structure ofinference completely devoid of perceptual reference or relevance. Matilal tells us, 'Nyaya gives an account of inference as a sequence of psychological events, the final event being held to be causally connected with the immediately preceding'. But he also tries to show that those psychological events do have the 'intentional structures or formal properties' of the objects they purport to grasp and express in language.¹¹ Also in his analysis of the Indian views of knowledge or prama he exhibits a systematic ambivalence. On the one hand, he recognizes the psychological/episodic character of judgment and inference, and on the other, taking cues from the anti-psychologism of Frege and Husserl, he tries to form 'abstract structures' from judgmental and inferential episodes. For this purpose, Matilal relies more on the syntactic than on the semantic aspects of linguistic expressibility of cognitive episodes. Appar­ently one of his aims as evident in this exercise is to save his version of 'direct realism' from the attack of psychologism/empiricism, He often speaks of cognition as representation of objective states of affairs in substantial disregard of the intervening factors. One wonders if the rules of inference can be defensibly described as representative.

III

The position of the dialectician, whether he is a Madhyamika or a Vedantin, needs to be treated with circumspection. It seems to have two aspects geared to two related aims, negative and positive. The negative or logico-analytic aspect is purported to point out the vulnerability of the stands taken by the opponents and, if possible, demolish them, Since this analytic-critical aspect is often elaborated in detail, it draws close attention and is widely known. This so-called negative dialectic is neither entirely negative nor itself in the nature of a refutable theory or position. One is advised to avoid such relative terms like 'position' (as distinct from 'opposition') and 'theory' (as distinct from 'practice'.) because both aspects of dialectic, separately as well as jointly, are equally vulnerable. Strictly speaking, dialectic, like dialogue, is not entirely negative. It is disclosive or, to use Hegel's favourite term, sublative. The entire richness, complexity and nuances of our experience cannot be neatly captured, without residue, by position and/or opposition, Via negativa, following the neti marga, the 'position', the iti, that is arrived at is not relative. Whatever it is: (Buddhist's); sunya or (Vedantin's) Brahman, it is absolute. It is not conceptualizable. Perhaps it is not even linguistically expressible. Does not one, by 'knowing' what sunya or Brahman is get in any way cognitively closer to it?

Under one interpretation, by knowing that the phenomenal world is not real (tattva} one realizes the 'futility' of positivism. T'he'futility' of positivism also brings to light the inaccessibility of our sense-mind to what is tattva or sunya. But sunya, in whatever way we understand it—negation, non-being, non-existence or essencelessness, need not cause despair in us. It may well be construed as the dawning ,of intellectual intuition (prajna). Sunyata, inaccessible to discursive judgment (drsti) is comprehensible only by prajna. To be more precise, sunyata and prajna are identical, Sunyata or prajna is negation of negation, absence of absence. In brief, it is the differenceless identity of jneya and jnana.

Confirmation of this interpretation's found in Nagarjuna's observations on the nature of nirvana, samsara and their interrelation, 'There is no difference at all between nirvana and samsara. . . the bliss consists in the cessation of all thought, in the quiescence of plurality.' And Buddha is said to have preached no other separate reality.¹²The same view is reformulated when it is said that the causally co-ordinated plurality of things known as phenomena is identical with nirvana or sunya whenviewed without causality, without co-ordination.

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