[Buddha-l] Niścaya again

[Richard Hayes]

I would belatedly like to thank Richard Nance, Dan Lusthaus, Stephen Hodge and 
Lance Cousins for drawing attention to helpful materials concerning a 
question I asked about the word niścaya. While I found the information 
provided helpful, nothing that was said directly addressed the question I 
asked, so I will try again.

First some background. Brendan Gillon and I are trying to finish the next 
installment of our translation of the Pramāṇasamuccaya. In conversations with 
Mark Siderits, we have discovered that he is of the view that when 
Dharmakīrti speaks of niścaya, he is speaking of the fact of being convinced 
that something is the case. A possible alternative to Siderits's view, one 
expressed by Birgit Kellner,* is that the word in question refers to 
something stronger than just being convinced; it may refer to the fact of 
KNOWING that something is the case.

The difference between knowing that P and being convinced that P is 
philosophically important. One can be convinced that P even though P is false 
(as George W. Bush and Tony Blair were convinced that Saddam Hussein was 
building weapons of mass destruction), but one cannot know that P even though 
P is false. 

If Dharmakīrti is speaking of inference as a means of adding to the things 
about which one is convinced, that is different from speaking of inference as 
a means of adding to our knowledge. Obviously, adding to one's convictions is 
a less demanding task than adding to one's knowledge.

My question is this: is the Sanskrit term niścaya (or the Pali nicchaya or the 
Tibetan nges pa) normally used in the sense of knowledge/ascertainment, or is 
it normally used in the sense of conviction/resolution? The exact usage of 
the term in Pramāṇasamuccaya is not at all easy to limn.

* Birgit Kellner (2004) "Why Infer and not just Look? Dharmakīrti on the 
Psychology of Inferential Processes." In <cite>The Role of the Example in 
Classical Indian Logic.</cite> Edited by Shoryu Katsura and Ernst 
Steinkellner. Vienna: Arbeitskreis für tibetische und buddhistische Studien 
Universität Wien.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes