Nyaya Logic ( Anumana — Vyapti — Hetvabhasa )

You see smoke rising from a hill and, without anyone telling you, you conclude there is fire up there. You did not see the fire. You reasoned to it. Indian logicians studied exactly this kind of everyday reasoning centuries before it had an English name, and built a five-step method around it — a method with its own name for the leap you just made, and its own list of ways that leap can go wrong.

In two minutes

Nyaya logic analyses inference (anumana) as a five-membered argument resting on vyapti, the invariable relation between the reason and what it proves, and it catalogues the ways a reason can only appear to prove something — the hetvabhasa.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Logic – II on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.