Ep. 346: Nyaya Sutra on Knowledge (Part One)

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our Questions for episode 346 are something like what are legitimate sources of knowledge? And when is doubt about them appropriate? And we read the first two chapters of the Matthew Dasti Stephen Phillips 2017 presentation of the Nyaya Sutra Selections with early commentaries. Sutra was probably initiated around 150 CE at the latest by the sutra maker, historically referred to as Akshapada Gautama, with commentaries in this book running up through the subsequent 800 years. For more information about this book and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, the uncontroverted in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:53 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, Tarkin and Jiven in Delray Beach, Florida.

0:58 Wes: This is Wes Alwan acting on the basis of questionable knowledge sources. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:05 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey drawing something similar to something familiar in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:11 Mark: How's everybody doing? We have a morning discussion in a while. Sunday morning is our official discussion time, but we just haven't done it. Somebody's been not free for months, seemingly.

1:24 Seth: Yeah. I can't remember the last time we did a morning session. Honestly, it's refreshing, except that I'm in a hotel room anxiously waiting for people to get on with their days so that don't have any background noise.

1:37 Mark: I thought you were gonna say it's refreshing except for the text that we're doing, which was a little bit punishingly boring and it was my choice. But what did you guys think?

1:46 Seth: Okay, when you wrote that, I was a little bit surprised, honestly, because when I first started reading it and I was like, oh God, more epistemology. Especially after the Gettier. I found this to be refreshing in the sense that it's just like, okay, here's essentially exactly the same issue, but the take is a little different. Now, granted, I think Phillips cast it in a much more analytic way than it probably reads in the original, but I was interested in the different take and the approach. And considering the crispness of the reasoning and the age of the texts, you're like, oh, well, why did it take the west many hundreds of years to catch up on this debate? Just like with psychology, right? Made me appreciate what I think is a pretty sophisticated set of texts that we just sort of neglect here in the West. Or at least I have.

2:38 Mark: So this is a follow up, more or less. I mean, the initial, the immediate impetus for doing this was that we just did the apparently it is gettier because he was an American, not Getty A. Anyway, I don't care but we just had just two episodes ago, in fact on page two or something of the introduction of this or maybe it was in the Stanford article that Phillips wrote. He says, oh yeah, the Nyaya would be very sympathetic with the reliabilism arguments. So half of what we were talking about that just in that we were saying Goldman's theory of reliabilism was supposed to be an account of justification based on well, something is justified and if it uses a justified procedure, if it uses a legitimate procedure. So we're getting the same thing here.

3:26 Wes: Justified procedure is not right because you can't use any epistemic terms in the reduction.

3:31 Mark: Well, I think that's maybe the potential issue with the way that the is describe it because they do seem to say, well, what makes for decent knowledge? Well, if you've got a decent knowledge procedure, right, which is in fact these terms that they have for perception, inference and testimony. Unlike our terms in English, the Sanskrit terms are all certification terms. It means successful perception, successful inference, successful test.

3:56 Seth: True.

3:57 Mark: In other words, it has the normative component built into it. So you, if you can't say oh I got it from testimony yet that testimony was false, you'd have to say it was not actually testimony, it was pseudo testimony. But anyway, that's just, that's just a semantic thing. So I'm not sure that these guys are actually fulfilling Goldman's challenge of defining knowledge in terms of not the normative terms of justification in non normative terms.

4:22 Dylan: Yeah, but they're definitely emphasizing that it's process that gets you to. And having the right alignment of process and even the notion of truth, you know, forget the word. But it's also aligned with things like fittingness and appropriateness and stuff like that. Use, I mean truth is. Use is another way of. All knowledge is associated with actions that get completed in the right way. So it's deeply pragmatic.

4:53 Mark: Yeah, that was interesting that. So the initial what took up most of chapter one seemed very uninformative to me because it was just like what are the knowledge sources? These are them, these three. Or you could consider this what comparison is another. But maybe that's a form of inference anyway. There's some basic categorization of things. There's a question, do they all reduce to perception? Right. In other words, testimony is only legitimate because the original person perceived it. Inference is only legitimate because someone has perceived how this and this go together in all past circumstances.

Or something like that. And I think there's disagreement among the commentators on that because they're still in a, a framework, a sort of semi dogmatic religious frame where they want to leave open that scripture could be, if you base on scripture, you're basing on testimony. But it's not clear that the people that wrote the scriptures had perceptions, at least in the ordinary sense, that they want to leave open. Which is again, something that at least came up in the Goldman discussion or in the subsequent, the Stanford article about that of like, well, could ESP be a legitimate knowledge source?

I mean, this is essentially what they're saying is, yes. Baked into our religion is the idea that some sort of supernatural perception that you can't have. Probably. But the people that wrote the sutras, or maybe the sutras weren't even written. Maybe they just grew from the ground natural. But so it might be that there's some testimony that is not reducible to perception. But in most cases it does come down to perception. And then there's this question because these folks are responding to Buddhist skeptics and non idealists, right? So idealists, non realists who are saying ultimately all of your knowledge is ungrounded because whenever.

So why do you believe the truth of perception? Well, because it works is what we were just saying. That's the response. But it just seemed like in, in practice, when you're wondering like, am I seeing something correctly? Well, you just like look at other things or you test with your other senses, you ask other people, you're always testing it via another knowledge source. So there was a question, is there an infinite regress in this, that you're legitimizing perception based on perception and is that okay? And they seem to be okay with that for the pragmatic reasons.

So it ends up being, at least according to Phillips and Dasti's interpretation here, something like a coherence theory of truth that, well, this justification fits with all the other justifications we use, which fits with our behavior. And so that might not be very convincing to a Buddhist who says it's all just empty. If everything is interdependent, then you don't actually have a foundational system. It's all based on crap and it's all illusory. Anyway, this is what they're up against.

7:37 Dylan: So I found myself a little bit like Seth, reading through it and finding it, knowing that it's an old text. And then we're reading commentary on it, on the text as well. The classification aspect of it. It did remind me of Aristotle and stuff like that, where you're going through and figuring out how you're breaking things up. Though he's. They're doing it differently than he did a bit. I confess. I, as I was reading it, they apparently the different commentators have slightly different takes on it and I was relying on the editor's comments to point those out. But I didn't myself synthesize those differences because these different commentators extend over I think what you said Mark, 800 years or something.

8:20 Mark: Yes. The main thing again, the original text is 150 or earlier. CE who's the guy that comments most is around 450. Uddyotakara is 550 and a familiar name from our previous episode. Our interview with Stephen Phillips is Vachaspati. That's how Phillips pronounced it. Vachaspati Mishra, who is around 900. So the original sutra maker, who knows who this was. They call him Gautama. But there's several different people named Gautama in the tradition this as Gautama. This name as just means looking at your feet. So is he deep in thought like the Greek philosopher who falls down a well because they're so deep in thought or.

I was reading somewhere else. Oh, it's actually related to focusing on perception. So it's a description of the Nyaya. In any case, his name is probably not actually Akshapada might not have been Gautama. And he writes like one sentence. Like this whole chapter would have been a half a page long if you read it without the commentaries. And that was maybe what was a little frustrating about this is that I knew from just reading the, the past Stephen Phillips Dasti thing that we read when he was a guest that this would be something that we would not need a guest for because anything that a guest would say is right there in the text.

It is as we said, like we've got the, the little original thing. We've got maybe what a commentator says about it. And then commenting on the commentators and commenting on the originals. The editors are just jumping in. Probably a third of the text is by them just really spoon feeding us. But it makes the whole thing rather slow. And we were sort of just revving up. Chapter one is the knowledge Sources. Chapter two is on Doubt. And then we're finally getting to like, well, what are they actually going to argue about? So other than a few examples that come in here and there's just to illustrate these methodological points, this is largely about method.

And ultimately the meat of it I think is they're arguing that the world is real as opposed to what the Buddhists say, that the we're not all in a veil of illusion all the time, that the self is real. We talked in the last episode about how a creator God can be argued for. It's not all just folly, etc. I'm not sure I'm as interested in the I'm not saying we have to do a second episode on this or anything so that we get at that, but I'm just wondering if you guys found it similarly, like we're having some buildup, we're establishing some tools that they're going to use, but then we didn't really actually see them use them that much.

10:50 Dylan: So I hear what you're saying, Mark. I did dip into that third chapter a little bit. I didn't find it quite as dissatisfying. To me, there's a big aspect of it that it's a tradition that I'm not familiar with. So just reading through it and the way in which it's put together, distinct from the one that I have most familiarity with, that itself has been interesting. And like Seth, maybe because it's 2000 years old, but it's sort of deeply pragmatic. I found that interesting. They're asking questions like, well, so we have knowledge for getting knowledge about things based upon use and from different sources.

I know something from different modes of perception. Do these things all converge on the same thing? So if I have inferential marks from different aspects in the example from the Nyaya Sutra as inferential marks for the self, our desire, aversion, effort, pleasure, pain and knowledge. So those are all ways in which I infer that there's a self. Do those all converge on one thing? So I just, I don't know what else to say, but I found it interesting to that level of sort of pragmatism of navigating your way through a combination of consistency and weighing things against each other to get to your actions, what are you going to do?

12:08 Seth: You know, you were asking, is there an appetite? Like you said, it's a sort of a build up. I think it would be interesting to at least maybe look at one of those topics. Something maybe like applying the method to an ontological or an ethical question to see how they do it. I would definitely be interested to look at the self piece and see a How do they characterize the Buddhist or the opposing viewpoint? Is the characterization strong or is the straw man? And then how do they approach it and try to understand what's the Buddhist, or what would be the Buddhist counter argument to that?

Because ultimately one of the things they share in common, right, Is the reliance on perception as the foundational element. The Buddhist essentially begins at the same starting point, which is perception, and uses an inferential move to get to anatman or whatever, no self. And so it'd be really interesting to see if we have two very compelling inferential moves from the same starting point that get to different outcomes and how that works.

13:11 Mark: Yeah, I should say so, folks, can just refer to episode 270. If you didn't already hear us talk about this before, this is some of those. When we interviewed Stephen Phillips, the design arguments for the existence of God, some of those were Nyaya arguments as well.

13:25 Dylan: And.

13:25 Mark: And we talked in that episode about argument structure, right? Nyaya. One of the things that could mean is just logic. And so it seems like with that argument structure and in these epistemological knowledge sources, these were. This is very early in the multiplicity of traditions, at least as it was originally set down, of course, by the commentators. We're having back and forth with various Buddhists, but provides some very foundational stuff so that even the Buddhists are using a lot of these argument forms. So there's nothing like in the baseline Nyaya Sutra itself that seems like maybe this guy wasn't even a theist.

Like, it's just, I guess it was originally something maybe that started about kind of like rhetoric in ancient Greece. Like you have to argue something before an important personage before a law court, essentially. Here's some ways to do it. Let's try to set up some sort of formal structure. So in some ways this is providing, I think, an intentionally boring baseline that maybe let's try to get some common practices and foundations that everybody, whatever school, whatever conclusions you eventually want to reach, are probably drawing on. So even if you come down against self, you're probably still going to be using inference in the way that these folks are analyzing it.

I think self is an interesting topic. That's. There's of course a later chapter completely on it, which we did not read, but it is brought in on page 19 of our text. Vatsyayana brings this in. He's actually trying to answer the question, does each knowledge source have its own domain of objects, or can they different knowledge sources focus on different sorts of objects? Which seems pretty obvious to me that the latter is the case. But you might. So the self, right, the testimony of the Upanishads, as there's a self, okay. But also as Dylan just quoted, we infer that there's a self from desire, aversion, effort, pleasure, pain.

Which seems like that's at least not an argument that's being sketched out for us. Like, what does that mean? If we took an inference to mean induction, then like, well, have you seen in the past that every time there's a desire, there's a self having the desire? Well, no, that's the thing that the Buddhist is arguing against is that it might seem to you that in your consciousness everything is owned, as William James says, that this is my desire, this is my. But the Buddhist is saying that is, you can't just take that as raw data and then infer in the future, hey, I see a desire, there also must be a self.

Like this is a much more foundational claim, which I think is just saying something that inference is not just induction. Inference is in fact that he. There's given a pretty long list of different types of inferences. It's just sort of anything that's not direct perception, anything that is reasoning at all. So in this Vatsyayana section, page 19, finally, there's a special kind of perception born of deep meditation, which yogis possess. Here's the quote. Perception of the self arises from a distinct kind of connection between one's mental faculty of attention and one's individual self.

So at least on this claim you can just perceive the self directly, or at least some people can. Maybe your perception of yourself that you think you always have, maybe that could be illusory. But if you're really, you really contemplate it, you can see, yes, ah, there's a self there. These do not seem helpful to me. The tools that they have given me for deciding this issue between the Buddhist and the realist, the Nyaya philosopher, given the little data that we provided, yeah,

16:55 Wes: I don't see this as tools. I see this as epistemology. So I don't think by looking by, by examining knowledge, maybe this kind of came up in the gettier as well. But this isn't a procedure for getting knowledge. It assumes that we can get knowledge and then if so how is that possible? And then you begin, right, you get a bit of a foundationalist account. Although the editors were saying there are also anti foundationalist strains in the sense that there's a coherence theory here, like Mark, I'm not sure how much of that is just imposed, right.

The trans. When the translation uses words like trope, which I'm pretty sure is in the. It's not just in the editor's commentary, but it's actually in the translation. I mean, it'd be nice to think that they were. That there's a word they are using that directly translates as trope, and that's what they're thinking about. But I feel a little bit skeptical. But in any case, I think calling them reliabilists, I think calling them realists is probably spot on. Reliabilists, maybe. Pragmatism, okay.

17:58 Dylan: Yeah.

17:58 Wes: In the sense that the right knowledge is supposed to be cashed out in success, there's some sense in which you don't know that or that someone else knows, except to the extent that some sort of successful action arises out of that. So there's a standard. There's an ultimate standard for knowledge that involves success in action. But again, I think the word pragmatism might still be a bit strong.

18:23 Dylan: Yeah, it might be.

18:24 Wes: But the point that I'm coming back to is just that. Yeah, I don't see this as if we do go on to the other chapters and we talk about the self and substance and causation. I don't see the epistemological part as preparing us for that in a methodological sense. And even if this were a logic. Right. Most philosophical logics aren't even really methodological. They don't. Hegel's logic is just metaphysics. Right. So in any case.

18:51 Seth: Yeah, yeah. I think the move here. It's easy enough to characterize the argument for the self that. That you just did, Mark, but I think it's unpacking the relationship, sort of. Well, not just the relationship. First, what is. We have the four knowledge sources, perception, inference, analogy, and testimony. And they address this. The comment, the commentators, the translators addressed this in one of the comments. The question of what is perception? For in the Nyaya Sutra, is perception theory laden already? Or is there such a thing as, like, simple perception?

Right. And that's the first thing that we have to look at. And then the notion of how does inference begin to work? How does inference work off of perception? And they're pretty explicit, right, that they have a notion of simple perception, bare perception, if you will, or a bare sensation. And then it's the old, very old, fairly as old as Aristotle too. The soldiers, all the soldiers fleeing, and then one of them stops, and then another one stops, and eventually you'd make a stand. And that's how you get an idea. That comment, they explicitly talk about how memory is critical to the ability to essentially use inference to create concepts, in which point your perception becomes theory laden.

So you change from seeing, from bare sensation to actually perceiving an object like a cow or, or what have you. And it's interesting because when, as soon as they say, well, you have to have memory as a critical function of consciousness, I think that factors into, for example, their notion of consciousness itself because then there's a notion of inference about non perception, inference about memory, and that becomes a different move. So that is all sort of buried in here. And as we, if we were to kind of literally hack through that and pull that out, it would dictate a lot of what we would be able to get out of this as a methodology for the purposes of talking about something like self or consciousness or the realism of the external world or what have you.

21:06 Wes: Yeah, I mean, we're not going to get a lot about self and there's a whole chapter. I mean, this is just an example. Yeah, unfortunately. And there's very little. We're just left puzzled because the point of this example here, right. This isn't a section about self. It's a section about how the different knowledge sources can converge on one object. We can infer the self. It sounds a little bit, I think, therefore I am. And as Mark said. Well, what do you mean? What kind of inference? For the most part, it looks like what they mean by inference is induction.

That's not induction. Okay. And then perception, deep meditation. I can somehow quote, unquote, perceive myself. And then you say, well, that's not really perception in the ordinary sense that they're talking about. We've been talking about Cat on the Mat, right? That's right in there. I mean, they were talking about Cat in the Mat too. On the Mat too, apparently. Just kidding. And then there's testimony. But unfortunately though, this is kind of a weird case. We're doing metaphysics now. Is that really the example we want to use or is it the case that.

It seems to be the case that maybe they only converge. The different knowledge sources converge on the same objects in the case of the self. Or maybe it's metaphysics, but I don't know. I don't think there's commentary on that. And then suddenly we're back to smoke and fire. So yeah, I think this leaves us kind of thirsting for more of the psychology and the metaphysics, but it doesn't tell us a lot about what's going on there.

22:27 Mark: I think we've brought a perception. Maybe we should just get into. So on page 20, the Perception Sutra 1.1.4, perceptual knowledge arises from a connection of sense faculty and object does not depend on language, is inerrant and is definitive. So that's all that the original sutra maker wrote, was that this one sentence and then these other guys are unpacking what this actually means, what the inerrant part was, this linguistic thing that I was pointing to, that just the Sanskrit word that corresponds to perception, as the editors point out. Well, we could use like to indicate success or certification that the only perception is a valid perception. If you say, I saw some water out in the desert and you really saw mirage, you could say, well, you actually didn't see it at all. You saw something, but you didn't see that.

23:20 Wes: Well, you didn't. Yeah. Did you see something though? You didn't perceive it, right. If it's. If you misperceive, you don't perceive at all. If you see something fuzzy, I don't even know if you see if C is the right word, but we can get into that.

23:35 Mark: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not semantics of the English version. Just as long as we understand. Well, it's not about Sanskrit.

23:42 Wes: It's not just about the semantics, though. It's a weird way to do this to say, well, sounds like they're trying to save the appearances. Perception is inerrant and therefore we're. We're going to call anything that is an error. We're not going to call it perception. Then what is it?

23:59 Dylan: Wes, you're making the point that we need to have a category for the perceiving of something wrong.

24:06 Mark: It's a pseudo perception.

24:08 Dylan: Pseudo perception or whatever it is.

24:10 Wes: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think from our perspective, right. We would want to say, well, if someone is hallucinating, the same sort of thing is happening in the brain as if they were actually seeing the thing that they are only hallucinating. I don't know that we would want to tie perception as closely to the connection to the object. Right. I think that's what's crucial here is perception. There isn't just this internalist criteria of something going on in the brain or the sense organs being activated in a way, Although maybe, maybe that's sufficient. But there's this actual ontology to this where the subject and object really are tied together in a certain way. And it's only then that you can say, oh, here we have perception.

24:55 Mark: Right. Uddyotakara is saying perception arises from the connection between the sense faculty and the object. So that is saying it's giving a causal theory. Well, connection is a little more vague than cause. But I think that's what they have in mind, a causal theory which is externalist. And in the commentary, I don't remember if it was in the text or in this. The Stanford, which also Phillips co wrote, was talking about this in terms of internalist views of knowledge versus externalist views of knowledge. We've talked about this distinction before.

But putting this in terms of the internalist view of knowledge is deontological. Right. That like Kant, you only have to in ethics care about your motive, things that are transparent to your consciousness. So that's an internalist theory of ethics. Whereas an externalist theory of ethics might be like utilitarianism. Where did you in fact create the most good for the most people? Like, you might not know, but it's about the results. And so actually thinking about epistemology in those terms that you could have a deontologist epistemology, which is the internalist or whatever the alternatives are.

And in fact, I saw Zagzebski, one of the authors we talked about last time, has a book called Virtue Epistemology. I've never heard those two words together. Anyway, I don't want to get too off topic, but.

26:15 Wes: Well, it sounds like. Yeah, so we can have. Have habits, more or less reliable habits of producing knowledge. That's what it sounds like. And a virtue is a set of habits. So yeah, you could have epistemic virtues that make us better knowledge producers than others. And if we're better knowledge producers, then we get an office job. Sorry.

26:34 Dylan: Could be a knowledge executive.

26:36 Wes: Get a knowledge CEO. Didn't they have. They had positions like that the last time I had an office job? Yeah.

26:43 Dylan: Well, there's a book called the Knowledge Executive.

26:45 Wes: Oh, there is, okay.

26:47 Dylan: Yeah.

26:47 Wes: Wasn't that a position? There's some kind of position like that in companies because they frequently like to get philosophical and justify their. What they're doing.

26:57 Seth: Is something like a Chief Knowledge Officer there?

26:59 Wes: Yeah, something like that. Yeah. There you go. Chief Knowledge Officer. I guess that's just tech, though. But anyway. Yeah. So I think. Yeah. Should we look at the six kinds of connection between.

27:10 Mark: Sure.

27:10 Wes: Object and.

27:11 Mark: This is where he talks about.

27:12 Wes: That's the kind of thing that the knowledge officer would have to know.

27:17 Seth: Yeah, you laugh, but there's gotta be like a certification you can get at Wharton or something like that in knowledge.

27:26 Wes: All right. Conjunction.

27:27 Mark: We're talking about connections between the sense faculty and the object. So. Yes. Are you connecting? Are you claiming knowledge about a substance? Then that's conjunction. If you're claiming about a particular instance of A property, a trope. Then you're using. You're focusing on the relationship between the faculty and the object. Is inherence in what is conjoined? Yeah, somebody else can continue because I'm

27:53 Dylan: not sure they have examples like the first one of conjunction connection between the sense faculty and the substance. For example, seeing a pot where the visual organ contacts the pot there where it is. And then inherence in what is conjoined connection between a sense faculty and a property that inheres in the perceived substance. For example, seeing the color of the pot, the color inheriting in the pot that is in contact with the visual organ.

28:20 Wes: And then in three we get the universal. Right. So it's a really. It's kind of an odd account. We have all these connections going on at once. One to the whole object it sounds like or to the substance. Maybe the whole object isn't even right there. But the substance in which properties in here then the trope properties. Then the universals of which the tropes

28:40 Mark: are instances inherence in what inheres in what is conjoined. Quote here.

28:47 Wes: The second one. Okay, so inherence. Why is that called inherence? And what is conjoined?

28:52 Mark: Well, what is conjoined is the substance just from the first one conjunction. So properties inhere in substances. But then this just this interesting metaphysical idea that the universal property is different from the individual trope property in that the universal inheres in the trope which inheres in the substance. And this they use in this inheres a lot that all wholes inhere in parts that later there's like. But I see the cloth. But you know, when I'm looking at a blanket I see the individual threads, but I never see the whole blanket. Well that's because the whole blanket inheres in the individual pieces of cloth like they use it here is quite freely here.

29:32 Wes: I think that's important because inheres. In that instance just means emergence. Right? This interesting relationship between macro level wholes and then microstructure the parts where the whole is much more than the parts.

29:48 Seth: It's interesting that that then the universal becomes an object of perception which is counterintuitive to the way we normally think about that.

29:57 Dylan: It does make it a way in which having everything all knowledge be via perception. It throws into the bucket of possibility more things.

30:06 Seth: Well, and it also. Not to harp on what I said earlier, but this is not the bare sensible perception they're talking about. This is the mature theory laden or concept laden or Consciousness, structured perception. Because you wouldn't have substances in bare perception, you wouldn't have any of these things in bare perception. So essentially what they're saying is once for the purposes of the epistemological process, which is only presumably undertaken by some level of mature or developed being, you perceive substance, property and property universal, presumably immediately and simultaneously, regardless of where your attention may be focused.

30:55 Mark: So I think you're helpfully bringing us to the next couple pages, where again in the original sutra it was arises from a connection between sense faculty and object. That's what we've been talking about so far. The second part does not depend on language, which is weird and requires these subsequent guys Uddyotakara is trying to figure out. But what I've just said, as you were just saying, Seth, is actually pretty clearly we do in perception focus on, for instance, universals. I see that as not just an individual instance of some color that is unique in the universe, but that it is blue and connects via my memory to past instances of blue.

So why say it does not depend on language? Like that seems very clearly to depend on language. And he ends up sort of saying, well, it sort of reminds me of the moments in a phenomenon like Hegel describes it. Oh, first we have the. So the first moment of perception is. Is without language. But then we have memory enter the picture. So the third moment of perception, and these are not subsequent moments, it's just that these are analytical ways you could break down. What just really happens all at the same time is we attach the names to the things so it doesn't have to depend on language.

But typically when we do have names for things, then the names do come in.

32:14 Wes: Yeah, when we do though. But they do, I think mention the fact that animals, right. They'll never going to have names, but they are essentially using concepts. I think that's the upshot here. We can use concepts without language. So you could call it theory laden and I think this is right, you could call it theory laden, but that doesn't mean it depends on language.

32:34 Dylan: Yeah, you get things out of raw perceptions that are concepts effectively, but you don't have words for them and you're not necessarily even thinking about them in terms of words.

32:45 Mark: Yep.

32:45 Dylan: There's a recent article or paper that came out that was really going after the notion that all reasoning is fundamentally language based and trying to do brain scan type things and demonstrate that's just not true, that lots of thinking happens. And then of course you get into lots of thinking and reasoning happens without having language. And Very quickly you get to parsing out what you mean by thinking and reasoning.

33:16 Wes: Yeah. I mean, going back to our Tomasello book, not to harp on this too much, but with the squirrel, I'll never forget the squirrel figuring out which of the two paths of action it's going to take and like doing the head thing, okay, do I go over here or do we go over here? Do I do this plan or do I do this plan? How is it going to cash out? Obviously engaged in hypothetical reasoning as well. So that's, you know, so on top of concept use, there is also in mammals, plenty of hypothetical reasoning about paths of action and which one is going to be better.

33:45 Dylan: Yep. Or like just the bird feeder that I have in my yard and before I got the baffle, looking at the squirrel trying to approach it and considering the likelihood that they were going to make it because they're, they're sitting there and they're looking and they're thinking about jumping. They're not jumping. And there is clearly a weighing of risk. Right. They're not just jumping and finding out if they make it, there is a judgment that they might not make it going on.

34:15 Wes: So they can visually imagine the two different paths. This is Tomasello's point. They're, they're doing basically trial runs, virtual trial runs in their heads. And all of this can happen without language. So I think it is quite insightful to point this out here. And it's part of the, it's going to turn out to be part of the anti relativist strain in Nyaya. Right. Going against the Buddhists. It's going to sound like. No, it's not going to be. This is all conceptual schemes and things like that.

34:46 Seth: Right.

34:47 Mark: I don't know that we completely finished the list of ways that we could be attached to an object.

34:53 Dylan: I wanted to go back to that list because I mean the 4 and 5 have to do with sound versus effectively seeing as the paradigmatic version. And somewhere in the introduction or something like that, there's the notion that there's a distinction being made in these schools that sound is a lot different than sight because of the way in which sound is perceived as being the motion of something. Which I thought was interesting. But the one that I find Most interesting is 6, and this is true in several parts here where they point out the perception of absence as being.

This one is qualifier qualified relation connection involved in a perception of an absence and the, this element of needing to go and look at the negative. Where you see a gap, you see a hole and that hole is being. Is pointing to something, a thing being missing that I think is pretty interesting and something that I don't remember, I've wondered about in the past, but I haven't come across it being part of a structure for an epistemology.

36:02 Mark: The absence of Pierre, like that's Sartre's 18th century.

36:06 Dylan: Okay, well, I don't remember if absence

36:08 Mark: of Pierre, but the fact that that's a weird phenomenological thing and not a attempt to give these very nitty gritty accounts of perception of you can say the light wave from the object hits the object and hits my eye. And I've given a very physicalist. But to say I can also say that there's the absence of the elephant in the room and that I register that and so I can literally perceive that. Not. I think I'm wondering if there's an elephant in the room and I look around and I don't see it. And so I've no, it's like that we could just perceive the absence.

36:47 Wes: I think the closest thing to this in the Western tradition is the method of division, right From Plato's sophist and he came up in Aristotle again where we. If we are calling things kinds or we're using concepts, then in a sense we are also concerned with what they are not because the species is carved out from the genus by Differentiae. And then Spinoza makes a bit about this, right? It. It becomes this very interesting ontological claim Hegel picks up on it, which is to say that what a thing is consists of its relations to other things. So it's not just in itself.

It has this weird relational existence. Although I don't think that's where Hegel ends up exactly. But. And that those relations include these negative relations, what it is not how it is carved out from the rest of reality. I don't know if that's what's going on here, if it's that well defined, but that seems to be the closest thing is that. I don't know what do you think? Is that related here or is it really just the elephant? That's not. No, no.

37:56 Dylan: It does sound related, but it also informs what they mean by perception. Because earlier in the previous five, I think you can feel like perception is something pretty close to the raw experience of the sense organs. But if you call six perception then you definitely get this whole theory ladenness that has. You have to have concepts in order to have that.

38:28 Wes: Right? And the way this. Just to give this more historical context, the way this cashes out through Hegelian influence on the Lacan and the structuralists, Saussure, post structuralists. Is that going back to our Saussure episode, that semantics, in a way, is supposed to come out of syntax? Or in other words, the. This is not the way it works for Saussure, but for the post structuralists who are interpreting him in a radical way. But just everything is based on difference. Everything comes out of difference. So you take a whole language system, you take a whole bunch of signifiers, and you get meaning out of a system of difference. So that's the most radical way to think about this. But in any case, we don't have to think about it that radically. It's just that the concept of difference is important to any use of concepts. That could be the more basic idea.

39:21 Dylan: And that's helpful, I think, because it also makes. It's a key component of being able to have anything iterative in trying to figure things out or talking about use and stuff like that. If you're going to have something to be action oriented. Right. It's going to be doing the differences between stuff to see what the result is.

39:38 Seth: Yeah.

39:38 Wes: You could be experimentally establishing a lot of negations.

39:41 Dylan: Exactly.

39:42 Wes: That's a really good point. Yeah.

39:44 Dylan: It's similar to the division, the method of division in this respect. Right. You know, method of division is effectively troubleshooting.

39:52 Wes: Right. You just want to make sure you land on a genuine unity.

39:55 Dylan: Yeah.

39:56 Wes: Not Socrates sitting on a chair, but on human being, not human being on a chair. Right.

40:01 Dylan: That's right. And that's the trick. Right. And that's where a lot of the argument comes in, is you're saying, well, you're doing the division. Right. Do you actually end up on something that makes sense as a unity or not?

40:12 Wes: Yeah.

40:13 Mark: I know you were just trying to skip over this auditory stuff, Dylan, but I wonder if the stuff about the weird view they have of sound might tell us something about sight and touch as well. So just they have the idea of there's this all pervading ether.

40:28 Dylan: Yep.

40:29 Mark: So it's like you're shaking the ether. You refer to it as movement. I mean, it is not that different than compression of where you need. You can't have sound travel through a vacuum. And so it's basically that we don't believe in ether, but we have air. And it's not that crazy to, like, the vibrations that are happening at the source do connect through the waves in the air to the vibrations in our ear. So it's. If you just get rid of the word ether, which is of course not the Sanskrit word anyway. But there's some metaphysical thing that is. Using the word ether as the translation, I think is implying that there's some science that is less than modern going on here. The way that they characterize it here is its inherence. So whereas perceiving red is inherent in the red ball or whatever, this is just inherence in the ether, which we don't perceive the ether. So it's just like sounds.

41:22 Wes: Sounds are properties.

41:23 Seth: Sounds are properties of the ether. Yeah. It's just a way to shoehorn it into that taxonomy.

41:28 Mark: But it's. So it's property without a substance.

41:30 Wes: Essentially there is the substance ether, but

41:33 Mark: it has to be posited only because there are these otherwise free floating properties. We don't detect the ether if they're not associated with the wind. And doing experiments of like, let's have a vacuum and see if you can hear through the vacuum. Like, if they're not doing anything like that and they really think it's like the west thought ether was. It's. Oh, the ether has to be just for space to exist. Like, the ether is what makes up space.

41:56 Wes: You can't have electromagnetic radiation.

41:58 Dylan: Yeah, it's the thing that vibrates.

42:01 Wes: Yeah. But we found out that electromagnetic radiation makes its own ether on the fly. Magnetism produces electricity and then electricity magnetism.

42:11 Seth: But anyway, would it be really hard to recast that in terms that are acceptable to the modern ear? I mean, it's either you just substitute air for ether or you could. Would it be like, no, the sound is actually a property that inheres in the thing that produces it. Like, does it get tricky and complicated if we try to cache it out or not? And what's the consequence of that?

42:35 Mark: I just was wondering why it seems that they have to make a separate category for it. When sight is also action at a distance and it is also something presumably providing the connection, the contact between the two things.

42:50 Wes: Well, I think we're less inclined to be realists about sound. Right. So sound is on the way to secondary qualities.

42:58 Dylan: Sounds like. Sound is like color.

43:00 Wes: Yes. But I think before we become philosophical about it, we're inclined to be realists about something like red and say, oh, yeah, the red is out there. The thing really is red. It's not just, hey, there's light bouncing off something and then my brain does something and it's just a qualia in my mind. I think we're less inclined to do that with sound. We're Less inclined to say, oh, the sound is just, is just out there. So like pain. It becomes a special case for the skeptic to say, hey, actually the skeptics are doing stuff with vision as well, of course.

Right. Hey, the clouds are a different color when they're in the distance, when they're far than when they're close and all that stuff. But I think things like sound and pain give a. They incline us more quickly to something that may sound to the Nyaya, like anti realist. And I think it's part of their realist project to make sure that doesn't happen.

43:52 Mark: I mean, I guess just looking at. So smell, touch and taste are mentioned, which you think smells might go in the same category as sounds. The sensory connection is inherent in the conjoined. So the conjoined is the object. So an apple objectively has this taste. It's not that the taste is in our minds, it's you're just finding out the taste by putting your tongue in contact with it. Whereas if sound is inherent in the ether, then actually it is just as much in the object as it is in my ear. I don't suddenly get, oh, now I taste like apple because I've tasted the apple. That doesn't work. But yet I now part of me, my vibrating eardrum now sounds like the gong. That is really the gong. The physical gong is over there.

44:40 Wes: Yeah. Taste, of course, was another classic example. And the ancient Greeks wanted to talk about the fact that taste changes when you're sick. So another skeptical tendency that suggests that, hey, these things we call properties are really relational. What they really define is not an in itself, but a relation between a person and the person's cognitive faculties and that object. And if you alter the faculties a little bit, someone gets sick, then you alter the property.

45:11 Mark: What's going on here? Just in that we would from the west then. Well, it has a taste. It's just a sour taste to me. What's the sweet taste to you? But they're going to have to say, no, the sweet taste is in the apple. But let's just. You're just not tasting it, you're mistasting. It's a zero taste.

45:27 Wes: And then if you miss taste, it's not a taste, it's something else.

45:31 Mark: Hey, this seems a good time to wrap up part one. Come back next week for part two. Unless you are a supporter through our website or Patreon, which case it should be in the feed now or shortly. To learn about all the possibilities, go to partiallyexaminlife.com support thanks.

45:45 Dylan: Thanks.