In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Perceiving Particulars:A Buddhist DefenseMark SideritsIn a recent article in this journal, Monima Chadha claimed that the position of certain Buddhist philosophers concerning the perception of particulars is incoherent.1 Her defense of what she calls a "Nyāya-Kantian" position raises interesting questions concerning how we have knowledge of mind-independent reality. While the view that she subscribes to may well be right, I shall try to show that her arguments against the (...) views of the Yogācāra-Sautrāntika Buddhists fail to undermine their position. But some of the issues involved here intersect with underlying themes in the recent debate between Arindam Chakrabarti and Stephen Phillips over the status of indeterminate perception in Nyāya,2 so I shall have something to say about that as well.The basic position I shall seek to defend has the form of a conditional: if we wish to maintain anything like the broadly metaphysical-realist stance that is fundamental to both Yogācāra-Sautrāntika and Nyāya (as well as to Kant), then we need to hold that in at least some cases of perception it is individuals as such that are the objects of our cognitive states. Chadha's discussion leads her to the conclusion that we never perceive particulars as such. Instead, she says, what are cognized in perception are always universal features, so that what are ordinarily thought of as the particulars [End Page 367] that figure in perception are such only relative to a context. Now, I am sympathetic to such a view, since it may be compatible with the sort of antirealism advocated by the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism.3 But this should tell us that something has gone awry here, since the "Nyāya-Kantian" and the Mādhyamika make for uneasy bedfellows. My diagnosis will be that Chadha has misconstrued those realist intuitions that stand behind the Yogācāra-Sautrāntika position. A proper appreciation of these will also turn out to play a role in the defense of indeterminate perception in classical Nyāya.1Let me begin by attending to some terminological matters. In the preceding paragraph I applied the label "metaphysical realist" to the Yogācāra-Sautrāntika school of Buddhism, to Nyāya, and to Kant. Few will question my calling Nyāya realist in any sense of that term, but eyebrows may well go up over my calling Yogāca ¯ra Sautrāntika (or at least the Yogācāra wing of this syncretic school) by the same name in the same breath. Yogācāra is, after all, aptly called a species of subjective idealism, for it denies the existence of physical objects. Metaphysical realism is usually understood as the view that truth is determined by the nature of mind-independent reality (by "what is there anyway"), and do not subjective idealists deny the existence of all mind-independent entities? But "mind independence" here does not mean being independent of cognition, but rather being independent of the concepts that we happen to employ. The metaphysical realist is thus one who holds that there is a quite determinate way that things ultimately are apart from any and all schemes of conceptualization. Understood in this way, metaphysical realism is something that is subscribed to by such subjective idealists as the Yogācārins and Berkeley.4 While they maintain that nothing exists apart from mind or the mental,5 they also hold that this fact is quite independent of the ways in which we or any other cognizers conceptualize reality. Subjective idealism is but one of a large number of ontological views that might properly be called realist in the present sense.But, then, what of Kant? Surely Kant is rightly thought of as maintaining that all of the phenomenal world is in some sense the result of processes of conceptual construction, so how can he be called a metaphysical realist? It is true that much of what is currently called antirealism has a distinctively Kantian pedigree. But to read Kant himself in this way, one must either disregard or else reinterpret much of what he has to say concerning the thing-in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Perceiving Particulars Blindly:Remarks on a Nyāya-Buddhist ControversyStephen H. PhillipsIntroductionThe discussion by Mark Siderits in this issue—"Perceiving Particulars"—and two pieces by Monima Chadha—the first her article "Perceptual Cognition: A Nyāya-Kantian Approach" (Chadha 2001) and the second her reply to Siderits in this issue—have taught me much.1 I have little to add beyond agreeing on the whole with Siderits and making a few tweaks concerning Nyāya. Chadha astutely captures the insight (...) of Gaṅgeśa, the fourteenth-century Naiyāyika cited by her (and by Siderits): indeterminate perception does not have a "particular as such" as its object (viṣaya), but only, as she says, a non-particular individual such as a universal or another qualifier that is in principle recurrent (recurrent out in the world), perceivable [End Page 389] again, and thus expressible by a (repeatable) word. Nevertheless, the holism of Wilfred Sellars and Kant and the attack on the "given" are not in the spirit of the Nyāya approach to epistemology, which is thoroughly externalist, as Siderits suggests. In several places (one presented below), Gaṅgeśa shows us controversy within Nyāya about indeterminate perception, including a rival Naiyāyika opinion that bare particulars are indeterminately grasped. This is not his own view, which is that positing indeterminate perception of qualifiers and not also of qualificanda is all that we need. But all in all the issue is not such a big deal, since perception does generate determinate knowledge of particulars, although these are always at least barely clothed.The notion of a "bare particular"—that is, the qualificandum thought about as distinct from all of its qualifiers—is an abstraction from what we directly perceive. We know it only by inference (specifically, by an inference of the sāmānyato dṘṣṭa type). Indeterminate perception is also known only by inference. Even in Navya Nyāya, the big deal is what is known determinately in perception, which is the principal way we know anything (the jyeṣṭa pramāṇa). And, clearly, determinate perceptual awareness is often of a particular—"The pot is blue" and "That's a pot," for instance. The particular known—indeed, the bare particular—is an intrinsic part of the viṣayatā, "intentionality," which is the relation between the knowing cognition and the world known.2Contrary to what Chadha says in her first article, "seeing as" does not require mental construction, according to Nyāya. The property bearer (dharmin = viśeṣya, "qualificandum") is grasped by the sense organ and is known directly in determinate perception as well as the qualifier and the qualificative relation. In two subtypes of perceptual awareness, (a) recurrent experience and (b) the recognition of something perceived previously, Chadha is right: the mind is operative, responsive to the firing of saṃskāra, "memory impressions," and fusing previous perceptual data into a current perceiving: (a) "A cow," "Another," "Another," and (b) "This is that Devadatta (I saw yesterday)." But hardly all cases of determinate perception require the mind (in Chadha's sense). The object known is minimally a complex of a property bearer (the particular as such), property, and an ontological relation tying them up, a-inherence-pothood (where "a" designates the pot as bare particular, "the subject of qualification"); the determinate perception, "That's a pot," makes that particular as qualified known.So, you say, I am agreeing with Chadha, whose argument is directed against the particular as such being known (either determinately or indeterminately) in perception. Yes, but the point is that the particular is known in perception; the particular-as-such is known in perception, although it would be fantasy to think it even possible that we could ever see her, this property bearer, well, not so much bare as disembodied. A rough analogy is seeing a door. We say we "see the door" when we see only one side of it, not the back. We see the thing as a door without grasping everything about the door that its being a door entails.Indeterminate perception of qualifiers is a controversial posit that does various work for Gaṅgeśa and other... (shrink)

This paper presents a partial analysis of perceptual knowledge, an analysis that will, I hope, lay a foundation for a general theory of knowing. Like an earlier theory I proposed, the envisaged theory would seek to explicate the concept of knowledge by reference to the causal processes that produce (or sustain) belief. Unlike the earlier theory, however, it would abandon the requirement that a knower's belief that p be causally connected with the fact, or state of affairs, that p.

Since Edmund L. Gettier reminded us recently of a certain important inadequacy of the traditional analysis of "S knows that p," several attempts have been made to correct that analysis. In this paper I shall offer still another analysis (or a sketch of an analysis) of "S knows that p," one which will avert Gettier's problem. My concern will be with knowledge of empirical propositions only, since I think that the traditional analysis is adequate for knowledge of nonempirical truths.