Gaṅgeśa on Epistemic Luck

Journal of Indian Philosophy 49 (2):153-202 (2021)
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Abstract

This essay explores a problem for Nyāya epistemologists. It concerns the notion of pramā. Roughly speaking, a pramā is a conscious mental event of knowledge-acquisition, i.e., a conscious experience or thought in undergoing which an agent learns or comes to know something. Call any event of this sort a knowledge-event. The problem is this. On the one hand, many Naiyāyikas accept what I will call the Nyāya Definition of Knowledge, the view that a conscious experience or thought is a knowledge-event just in case it is true and non-recollective. On the other hand, they are also committed to what I shall call Nyāya Infallibilism, the thesis that every knowledge-event is produced by causes that couldn’t have given rise to an error. These two commitments seem to conflict with each other in cases of epistemic luck, i.e., cases where an agent arrives a true judgement accidentally or as a matter of luck. While the Nyāya Definition of Knowledge seems to predict that these judgements are knowledge-events, Nyāya Infallibilism seems to entail that they aren’t. In this essay, I show that Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya, the 14th century Naiyāyika, solves this problem by adopting what I call epistemic localism, the view that upstream causal factors play no epistemically significant role in the production of knowledge.

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Nilanjan Das
University of Toronto, Mississauga

Citations of this work

Raghunātha on seeing absence.Jack Beaulieu - 2023 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31 (3):421-447.
Śrīharṣa.Nilanjan Das - 2018 - The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Epistemology in classical indian philosophy.Stephen Phillips - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

Epistemic Luck.Duncan Pritchard - 2005 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?Edmund Gettier - 1963 - Analysis 23 (6):121-123.
Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in Epistemology.Ernest Sosa - 1991 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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