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.