The Religion & Culture Web Forum
Commentary Footnotes
November 2006
Justification and Truth, Relativism and Pragmatism:
Reflections on Indian Philosophy and its Lessons for Religious Studies
By Daniel
A. Arnold
Assistant Professor of the Philosophy of Religion
University of Chicago
1 This is the point that Gottlob Frege makes when he says that “I understand objective to mean what is independent of our sensation, intuition and imagination, and of all construction of mental pictures out of memories of earlier sensations, but not what is independent of reason; for to undertake to say what things are like independent of reason, would be as much as to judge without judging, or to wash the fur without wetting it” (The Foundations of Arithmetic [Oxford: Blackwell, 1959], §26). Similarly, the philosopher Donald Davidson has said that “empiricism is the view that the subjective ('experience’) is the foundation of objective empirical knowledge” (Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective [New York: Oxford University Press, 2001], 46).
2 Robert Brandom, “The Pragmatist Enlightenment (and its Problematic Semantics),” European Journal of Philosophy 12:1 (2004), 13.
3 Not wishing to give short shrift to the complex and profound insight that Buddhists have arguably developed (and in particular, to the possibilities for this insight’s being both spiritually transformative, and variously elaborated philosophically), I will at least refer the reader here to Steven Collins’s Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Therav?da Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), which is the standard account.
4 Consider, as well, that when one sees, say, a tree, there are all manner of causes of the resultant cognition (including numerous neurological events, etc.); and it turns out to be very difficult to specify which one among these innumerable causes is at the same time the thing perceived. Even with respect simply to sensations, then, exhaustively causal explanation is not as straightforward as might be supposed.
5 Consider, in this regard, the difference between my arguing that you ought to vote for proposal X because it will, in specifiable ways, address the situation at hand, and my saying you ought to do so because it seems clear to me that it’s a good thing. That the latter does not amount to a useful justification is clear if we imagine generalizing it; for surely no one would think it a good reason if you were then to say to someone else that they ought to do this because it seems clear to Dan Arnold that it’s a good thing.
6 John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 80.
7 To invoke the idea of a realist conception of truth is, perhaps, to skate on thin ice, insofar as the philosophical literature on such matters is both highly technical (such that one could thereby be taken as commending far more in the way of metaphysical apparatus than one realizes), and greatly various in terms of usage. For the present, suffice it to say that I wish to commend as “realist” what I take, in fact, to be simply the common-sense understanding. The notion I have in mind might, however, be better captured by the technical term deflationist. For a brief but useful statement of some of the relevant philosophical issues here, see John McDowell, “The True Modesty of an Identity Conception of Truth,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13:1 (2005): 83-88.
8 Francis Clooney, Thinking Ritually: Rediscovering the P?rva M?m??s? of Jaimini (Vienna: Sammlung De Nobili Institut für Indologie der Universität Wien, 1990), 145, 149; for a fuller elaboration of Clooney’s insightful characterization of the characteristically M?m??saka vision in this regard, see 129-162.
9 J. N. Mohanty, Gange?a’s Theory of Truth (Santiniketan: Visvabharati, Centre of Advanced Study in Philosophy, 1966), 78.
10 The cardinal doctrine of “dependent origination” of all existents represents the flip-side of the Buddhist denial of a “self”; that is, the reason we do not have unitary and enduring selves just is that any moment of experience can be explained as having originated from innumerable causes, none of which can be specified as what we “really” are.
11 Thus, in one of the main texts I considered, Candrak?rti—who is here commenting on the text by N?g?rjuna that is foundational for the Madhyamaka school of thought—imagines Dign?ga objecting, with respect to the claim made in N?g?rjuna’s first verse, “Is the conviction [expressed in your first verse] based on a pram??a, or is it not based on a pram??a?”
12 The passage goes: “Whether or not Tath?gatas arise, the nature of existents abides.” For some sources and scholarship relevant to this often-invoked passage, see Buddhists, Brahmins, and Belief, 186, 281 n39.
13 Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 5 (here quoting Roland Barthes). Surely the M?m??saka project, in particular, lends itself to this kind of characterization—as well recognized by some of its traditional critics. Thus, the Indian materialist philosopher B?haspati is recorded to have urged that the various practices associated with Vedic religion, far from being eternally enjoined, were in fact thought “introduced by the Brahmins as a way of making a living.”
14 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 114.
15 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 34-5. Note (what is sometimes overlooked by Asad) that this idea—i.e., that one must first have cultivated oneself as the kind of person who is sensitive to the truth in order to know it—expresses a basically Aristotelian conception of ethics. The fact that this characteristically Aristotelian idea includes the recognition that the truth in question obtains whether or not one has been thus cultivated that kind of person is reflected in Asad’s further remark that “[e]ven Augustine held that although religious truth was eternal, the means for securing human access to it were not.” Asad’s ideas in this regard reflect the influence of Michel Foucault, whose work on “technologies of the self” is not, it seems to me, as prone as that of Asad to elide questions of truth.
16 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Maldon, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 64. For an illuminating appropriation of Hadot by a scholar of Indo-Tibetan philosophy, see Matthew Kapstein’s Reason’s Traces (Boston: Wisdom, 2001), 3-26.
17 A discussion of whether or not this is the case figures prominently at the beginning of one of the early M?m??saka commentaries.
18 Candrak?rti eloquently says as much at Madhyamak?vat?ra 6.4-5.
19 Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 163.
20 On the reading that Schubert Ogden develops in his Is There Only One True Religion or Are There Many? [(Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1992) see 23-26, 53-7], this is the a priori view characteristically defended by theological “pluralists” like John Hick—against which, Ogden proposes the logically significant view that more than one religion may be true, but that whether or not this is the case cannot be known a priori.
21 Stanely Fish, “Postmodern Warfare: The Ignorance of Our Warrior Intellectuals,” Harper’s, July 2002: 33-40.
22 Fish, 34. This point enables Fish succinctly to frame the issue at stake here: only if there were such indisputable norms “could the question 'Is this a religious war?’ be a real question, as opposed to a tendentious thesis pretending to be a question, which it is. That is to say, the question 'Is this a religious war?’ is not a question about the war; it is the question that is the war” (35).
23 Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 231.
24 Stout, 255. See also Stout’s essay “Radical Interpretation and Pragmatism: Davidson, Rorty, and Brandom on Truth,” in Nancy K. Frankenberry, ed., Radical Interpretation in Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 25-52. Stout understands that this point is useful also in explaining an issue that emerges as central to the debate over how best to interpret Kum?rila’s claims about the M?m??saka epistemological position: that of how our beliefs can change (how, that is, we can judge some of our earlier beliefs to have been overridden). Thus, one “can be justified in believing a moral claim at one point in his life and justified in rejecting precisely the same claim at a later point, whereas the truth-value of the claim has remained the same all along” (2004: 240). This account of change in one’s own beliefs is usefully invoked as an argument for respecting the possibly justified status of others with whom we disagree: “The line of reasoning that counsels humility with respect to our own beliefs also counsels charity toward strangers.... That is what we should expect if being justified in believing something is a contextual affair. Unless we are prepared to give up our own beliefs at the points of conflict, we shall have to say, on pain of self-contradiction, that some of their beliefs are false. But unless we can show that they have acquired their beliefs improperly or through negligence, we had better count them as justified in believing as they do” (2004: 234).
25 It turns out, though, often to be very difficult to be certain that this is so. The more deeply one delves into such highly ramified systems of belief as, say, “Buddhism,” the more complex and in need of qualification any particular one of its claims turns out to be. This, I think, is the most compelling reason why Ogden (n.20, above) is right to consider the possible truth of rival beliefs a necessarily a posteriori question—and some judgments in the matter may have to await the findings of a lifetime of inquiry.
26 Stout 2004: 245. For further reflections on truth as something like a “regulative ideal,” see also 248-256.
27 This is a point recurrently missed by William James, who frequently says, in his The Varieties of Religious Experience, that all he needs to do in order to show the failure of characteristically “rationalist” projects in philosophy is “point to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, even religiously disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as convincing.... if [such a project] were as objectively and absolutely rational as it pretends to be, could it possibly fail so egregiously to be persuasive?” [(New York: Penguin, 1985), 454]. I hope to have shown why the answer to James’s rhetorical question had better be, “Well, yes.”
