Concept(category)

Check Balu’s paper on comparative theology, and in particular Francis Clooney’s: Translation, interpretration and culture: on the disingenuity of a comparative theology

What is wrong with the intercultural exchange of categories? Throughout one gets the impression that there is something “fundamentally wrong” with categories shifting in meaning over time or with the introduction of categories from one culture into another culture. But what is important about these shifts in meaning? What exactly is the problem in introducing the category of religion into India or …

In our daily life, we hardly pause to reflect upon many problematic things that we routinely assume as self-evident. Such an attitude is useful since it allows us to focus on other things that occupy us at that moment. One such attitude is not to bestow too much care on how we use language: we routinely speak of similarity in meaning, identical concepts, exact and accurate translations and so on. …

Many are concerned that English translations of some words from native languages distort their meaning. If we restrict ourselves to terms like ‘Deva’, ‘Dharma’ and such like, the worry is not just that their translations distort the meaning of these words (as we use them in our native languages) but that they suggest something (by way of reference and meaning) that does not even exist in these …

In the second half of the nineteenth century, some western-educated, Bombay intellectuals came together in the Prarthana Samaj (inspired by Keshub Sunder Sen of the Brahmo Samaj). Perhaps the best known members of the Prarthana Samaj were Mahadev Govind Ranada and Narayan Chandavarkar (the Vice-Chancellor of Bombay University). Both reformers advocated what they literally called Hindu …

We have developed partial explanations of why the secularism debate in India takes such peculiar forms and why otherwise intelligent people talk nonsense here. But we don’t do so by pegging our use of the word secularism “onto Balu’s theory about the nature of religion and how that entity religion behaves in the world” and then expecting that other people do the same. Let me quickly repeat our …

While reading Shabnum Tejani’s *Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History (*2008), I ran into the same weird point that Neera Chandhoke also tried to make at the RRI platform debate on secularism. This is a combination of the old claim that ‘secularism’ has acquired a different meaning in India and a general theoretical point: ‘secularism does not have any essence or universal meaning, …

The issue is simply this: why use Indic categories to describe the world? What is interesting or important about this goal or venture? This, as I said, is the issue but we need to do some amount of thinking before we can identify the real question. That is so because there is a lot of deadwood floating around that makes navigation difficult. So, let me begin the process of clearing some of the …

Social psychology, for instance, speaks of ‘categorization theory’, and we do use ‘categorization’ also in the sense of classification. However, unless one gives a technical meaning to ‘category’ (which one can), these usages do not violate the primary distinction between a word from some natural language and its meaning. Consider a classificatory scheme, say, cubes. Here, ‘cube’ is a word, it …

Let me give the gist of the consensus and overlook philosophical nuances about categories. Consider the following sentences: ‘It is raining’, ‘het regent’, ‘Es Regnet’, ‘Baarish aa raha hai’. All these sentences have the same meaning, namely that it is raining. Or it could also be said that they all express the same “proposition”. So, “meaning” and “proposition” are used as quasi-synonyms; and …

Consider the thought that ‘meanings’ (leave aside the distinction between words and sentences on the one hand and concepts and categories on the other) do not exist outside historical contexts. What exactly does this thought say? Begin with ‘historical context’. Either every situation that an individual human being finds himself is a ‘historical context’ (because human beings are always ‘in a …