Abstract
Logical and semantical issues surrounding non-denoting terms have been investigated since ancient times, in both the Western and Indian philosophical traditions. And in a more applied formal setting, such issues have also gained importance in constructive mathematics, as well as computer science and software engineering. The paper first presents a strategic exploration of logical treatments of reference failure in Western thought, and then goes on to provide a comparative examination of the issue in the Indian tradition, particularly with respect to the dispute between the Yogācāra-Sautrāntika school of Buddhism and the Nyāya school of Hinduism. The paper concludes by advancing a formalization of the Buddhist apoha semantical theory in terms of a dualdomain Free logic.
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Schweizer, P. (2015). Negative Existentials and Non-denoting Terms. In: Banerjee, M., Krishna, S.N. (eds) Logic and Its Applications. ICLA 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8923. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45824-2_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45824-2_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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