This article concentrates on certain beliefs that many Indian thinkers implicitly accepted and that show up in an analysis of reasoned arguments they presented. These beliefs concerned the relationship between language and reality. For Brahmanical thinkers, who owed their privileged position in society in great part to their mastery of texts — the Veda — that were deemed to be directly connected to reality, this relationship between language and reality was a matter of course. For reasons of their own, Buddhist thinkers had come to think that the world of our experience is largely determined by language. This shared belief, which most often though not always remained implicit, found its way into certain arguments. These arguments remain unintelligible without an awareness of the underlying belief.

本文重点关注许多印度思想家暗中接受的某些信念，这些信念在对他们提出的合理论证的分析中显现出来。这些信念涉及语言与现实之间的关系。对于婆罗门思想家来说，他们在社会中的特权地位在很大程度上归功于他们对被认为与现实直接相关的文本——吠陀经——的掌握，语言与现实之间的这种关系是理所当然的。由于他们自己的原因，佛教思想家开始认为我们的经验世界在很大程度上是由语言决定的。这种共同的信念，虽然通常并不总是隐含的，但在某些论点中找到了它的方式。如果不了解潜在的信念，这些论点仍然难以理解。