[Buddha-l] Logic

[Richard Hayes]

On Monday 12 May 2008 09:00, Jackhat1 at aol.com wrote:

> Is there a term for beliefs or concepts that cannot be  either disproved or
> proved, i.e., there is no evidence either way?

I assume you are asking for the term in Sanskrit. Buddhist "logicians" used 
the term "anaikaantika" for a proposition that had some evidence pointing 
toward its being true and other toward its being false. The Sanskrit word 
means "inconclusive" (or, more literally, not having a single conclusion".

According to the Buddhist "logicians", the vast majority of things that people 
say fall into this category of propositions for which there is no conclusive 
evidence. The problem with most discourse, they claim, is that people speak 
as if they had conclusive evidence, but it almost always turns out that they 
are simply ignoring evidence that points to the opposite of what they 
believe. Care in speech (and hence in following the four speech precepts) 
consists in, among other things, being mindful of when one is speaking 
absolutely when the available evidence supports nothing more than speaking 
provisionally.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes