Properties of valid knowledge

We have already noted that the fourth stavaka deals with the fourth contradictory statement. The opponent says that even if God is admitted he cannot be called a pramāṇa. He cannot be said to be an agent or an instrument in the act of producing valid knowledge. The knowledge of God cannot be called valid, because it reveals what is already revealed. Nyāya claims that the knowledge of God is eternal and related to all the objects in the world, nothing remains unknown to him. So his knowledge always reveals what is already reveled and it cannot be valid. Actually, Udayana is trying here to refute the Mīmāṃsā theory of knowledge, though with an effort to relate it with the concept of God.

According to Mīmāṃsā, one of the essential characteristics of valid knowledge is novelty. A knowledge to be valid must reveal what has not been revealed by any other source of knowledge. If this is not admitted, even memory will become valid knowledge. But memory is not so because it does not give us any new information. It shows only what has been known earlier. But Nyaya does not consider novelty to be a property of valid knowledge. The definition of Mīmāṃsā becomes both too narrow and too wide. The first fallacy occurs in the case of a continuous cognition. For example, a person looks at a jar for a long time and cognitions of the jar are produced one after another as long as there is the contact between the sense and the jar. It is a continuous cognition of the jar consisting of a number of cognitions gradually produced. Here each individual cognition is valid, because it reveals the jar correctly. It cannot be called invalid in any way. But the Mīmāṃsaka definition will not be applicable to the cognitions starting with the second, because all of them reveal a jar which has been already known by the first cognition. The definition will apply only to the first cognition. For example, one may look at a piece of shell for the first time and wrongly cognise it as silver. Here the knowledge reveals what has not been known earlier. So the definition applies to it also. It may be pointed out that in that case memory also will become a kind of valid knowledge. But Udayana says that there will be no difficulty. Memory is not considered valid because the object revealed by it is the same as one revealed by the previous apprehension producing it. In the case of memory one first apprehends an object, an impression is produced and it remains in the self. Later due to the appearance of some special factor the impression is revived and memory is produced. An object which has not been earlier apprehended cannot be an object of memory. Moreover, the object of the apprehension and the object of the memory must be the same. Memory is thus not independent. Its validity depends upon the validity of the original apprehension. It is for this reason that memory is not considered valid. The invalidity of memory has nothing to do with the condition that it does not reveal anything new.^[1]