Nov/090
Paper Abstract
(In progress for Fall 2009).
Śantarakṣita (725-788 CE) was an Indian Buddhist philosopher who attempted to synthesize earlier schools of Buddhist thought into a single coherent system, one that reconciled the anti-essentialism of the Madhyāmaka Nāgārjuna, the mind-only idealism of the Yogācāra Vasubhāndu and the causally grounded pseudo-realism of Dhārmakīrti. His massive work, the Tattvasaṇgraha, was dedicated to defending this unified Buddhist system against non-Buddhist opponents (as well as dissenting Buddhist thinkers). In one crucial section, he defends his theory of meaning, apoha, against Kumārila. Apoha can be understood in Western terms as a form of radical contextualism (or what François Recanati calls “meaning eliminativism”). One of the reasons Kūmarila objects to this picture of meaning is that we have the intuition that words have stable referents outside of utterances. Śantarakṣita explains the source of this (erroneous) intuition and gives a model of word-meaning in terms of “exclusion sets” which are determined by the context of utterance. It is through the stable capacity of words to exclude a range of images within a context that we have the illusion of non-contextual word meaning. Typical of his synthesizing approach, he also demonstrates that Kumārila’s intuition that word-meaning is subjectively grasped by a positive mental representation of a referent, not simply a negative exclusion set, can be subsumed under his view. Thus while he repudiates Kumārila’s view of semantics (called abhihitānvayavāda), he successfully strengthens the psychological story associated with the radical contextualist, or anvitābhidhānavāda, view.
Aug/090
Perception in Analytic Philosophy
Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Problem of Perception
The SEP has a brief overview of theories of perception, which I summarize below for the sake of making comparison with Indian philosophies of perception.
Sense-datum theory - in perception, we are aware of objects, sense-data, which have the properties we attribute to physical things. We are in contact with sense-data, which is why a hallucination of a table and a veridical perception of a table appear identical; we are in contact with sense-data instantiating brown, table-shaped properties.
Indirect realism - a kind of sense-data theorist who holds that, despite our being only directly acquainted with sense-data, we are indirectly acquainted with ordinary objects. In contrast, an idealist or phenomenalist would argue that we are not acquainted with ordinary objects at all. Both agree, however, that the mechanism of perception is contact with sense-data.
Adverbial theory - believing that positing things such as "sense-data" was to create unnecessary metaphysical baggage, adverbialists claim that instead we are "experiencing brownly" rather than "experiencing brown." Properties of our modified experience (or qualia) are intrinsic to the event of experiencing and phenomenal, available to our conscious mind.
Intentionalist theory - perception is a form of representation, verdical perceptions are direct representations of objects around us (no sense-data) and hallucinations are misrepresentations. The content of the perceptual experience is not, however, essentially drawn from the objects themselves (otherwise hallucinations could not be explained - they share the same phenomenal character with veridical perceptions).
Disjunctivism - veridical perception and hallucination are fundamentally different mental states, even if they are subjectively indistinguishable. Disjunctivists can allow that veridical perception and hallucination arise from identical brain states, but they reject a supervenience account which makes the perceptual state identical to the brain state. Instead, perception depends upon a relationship with the object (rather than sense datum) and such relationship is direct (like the intentionalist, except that it is not possible when hallucinating).
Next: Indian philosophies of perception and analytic philosophies of perception. How does comparative philosophy proceed?
Aug/090
Perception in Indian Philosophy
Source: Classical Indian Philosophy, J.N. Mohanty. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2000.
In Indian philosophy, the word "pramāna" refers to the cause of a true cognition, or a "pramā." Perception is, for all schools of Indian thought, the cause of true cognition. However, there are different analyses of the relationship between the cause of a cognition and the cognition itself. Mohanty gives a brief overview of these views in the second chapter of Classical Indian Philosophy.
Nyāya - perception is caused by 1) the self having contact with the mind; 2) the mind having contact with the senses; 3) the senses having contact with the objects of cognition. There are two stages of perceptual cognition - first, a nonconceptual/nonlinguistic experience (nivikalpaka) which apprehends universals such as color and form. The second stage (savikalpaka) requires linguistic structure, a subject-predicate relationship such as "this table is brown."
Digñaga (Buddhist) - perception is a cognition that is concept-free. Any kind of conceptual constructions, which are not pure sensation, are excluded from perception.
Dharmakīrti (Buddhist) - perception is concept-free and inerrant cognition.
Jainism - perception is a vivid, distinct and conceptual (with regard to universal features) manifestation of objects
Advaita Vedāntin - perception is immediate apprehension, through the apprehension of consciousness which has an identity of form with the object being perceived. There are two stages, but the first stage is mere appprehension of "something" or existence (sat). The second stage adds a concept, which makes the perception determinate. Witness-perception is the immediate awareness of consciousness, of things like pleasure and pain, which don't need a cognitive act, like external perception.
Next: a brief overview of perception in analytic philosophy and loose comparison to Indian categories.
Aug/091
Arbitrary Marks n.0
Welcome to Arbitrary Marks. If you've managed to find my blog again, congratulations. The previous version is now archived as an unreadable, yet intact (I hope) SQL table on my server. Eventually I hope to revive the better posts I wrote over the last several years.
In the meantime, this latest incarnation of Arbitrary Marks promises to be updated less frequently and with more unapologetically academic material. My goal is to use this as a reading journal. I anticipate once-weekly posts if my discipline holds steady throughout the school year.
If you're a new visitor, I recommend you go to my home page to learn about me, or the "about" page here.