Sun, 03 Oct 2010
Modal Logic and Buddhism
When studying Buddhist philosophy and comparing it to Western philosophy and science, one comes acrss some curious holes. One is that as far as I can tell, Indian logic did not include modal logics, unlike classical Aristotelian logic. Modal logic concerns the use of the terms necessary and possible in propositions. The usual explnation of these terms is that a proposition is necessary if it is true in all possible worlds and possible if it is true in at least one. That possible world need not be our actual world, so a statement can be possibly true but still false. As I said, Indian logic, including Buddhist logic, does not handle these concepts. One reason modal logic is interesting is that the scholastic proofs for the existence of God depend heavily on it. Anselm's argument, the so-called ontological proof, depends on the idea of a necessary being and Aquinas' prime mover, or cosmological proof, depends on every event necessarily having a cause. I do not think these arguments could be made or refuted within Indian philosophy because they lacked modal logic.
