[Buddha-l] Realism, anti-realism and Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

Dear denizens of buddha-l,

Just recently I discovered that the word "denizen" means an inhabitant
or dweller. All these years I thought it was a portmanteau word
meaning "one who denigrates Zen". Now that I know what the word means
(according to Webster, but what does HE know?), I vow never to use it
again. How can someone dwell in or inhabit buddha-l? It's virtually
impossible. But already I digress, even before I begin.

Recently I have been reading some philosophical texts written in, of
all things, English. The topic of these texts has been the controversy
between metaphysical realists and anti-realists. There are several
ways of discussing that controversy, but one pretty accessible way of
differentiating between realists and anti-realists is what they think
about what some folks call truth value gaps. 

A realist, say some, is a person who believes that every proposition
does in fact have a truth value, although many (indeed, the vast
majority) have truth values that remain unknown to human beings. So a
realist would be inclined to say "It is either true or false that the
Buddha's cousin Ananda had a wart inside his left nostril, but there
is no way of knowing whether that claim is true or false. It is
knowable in principle, but unknowable given the current state of the
evidence available to us." A realist is inclined to believe that there
are objective truths and that a careful and scrupulous gathering of
evidence will enable one to get ever closer to learning what the
objective truth is. Peter van Inwagen defends this position quite
strongly; he goes so far as to say that the anti-realist position is
incomprehensible and is held only by people who are so stubbornly
allergic to authority that they will not even let the authority of
reality to influence their thinking.

An anti-realist, on the other hand, would be inclined to say that all
propositions make sense only in the context of a system of beliefs
that a person already holds, and if no context exists to decide
whether a proposition is true or false, then it simply has no truth
value. It leaves a truth value gap. Quine gives the famous example of
classifiers in Japanese. In Japanese (and Chinese), numerals are
accompanied by classifiers; which classifier goes with the numeral is
determined by the category to which the thing being enumerated belongs
to. In Japanese, flat objects take the classifer "mai" and small
cuddly animals take the classifer "piki" and so forth. Now, says,
Quine, semanticists can (and do) argue about whether the classifier
should be considered part of the number system, or whether all nouns
are mass nouns that can be turned into count nouns by adding a
classifer onto a number (in much the same way that we can make the
mass noun "cattle" act something like a count noun by adding a phrase
such as "head of"---we cannot say "three cattle" but we can say "three
head of cattle"). What Quine says is that there just is no answer to
this question. There is no (objective) truth to the matter. There are
different ways of explaining the semantics of classifiers in Asian
languages, and all of them make sense within a context, but none of
them can be said to be true to the exclusion of the others. So a
proposition about how classifiers work in Japanese, if taken as an
expression of objective truth, fails to have a truth value; taken as a
set of contextualized propositions, it can have more than one truth
value. 

Building on Quine, Putnam makes the bold claim that there is no such
thing as a proposition that is meaningful independent of a system of
pre-existing beliefs, and that the very issue of what counts as
evidence for any claim is driven by these pre-existing beliefs. A man
counts as evidence that which reinforces her beliefs. (A woman, on the
other hand, just knows that everything he says is true.) Well, this is
a bit of a caricature, but it sufficies to set the stage for what I'd
like to discuss her on buddha-l (a land of no dwellers). 

As all of you surely know by now, I am temperamentally incapable of
taking sides on any metaphysical, aesthetic, or moral issue, and I
readily admit that my political views are nothing but sheer prejudice
that cannot possibly be defended by any appeal to either reason or
evidence. (I suspect that this is true of everyone's metaphysical,
aesthetic, moral and political views, but I have no way of knowing
such things.)

So my interest is not to discuss whether realism or anti-realism is
the better stance, but to try to figure out on which side of this
issue various Buddhist thinkers come down.

For starters, I would be inclined to think that Nāgārjuna and
Candrakīrti are probably anti-realists. I know next to nothing about
Yogācāra, but I'd guess it might also have anti-realist proclivities.
Dharmakīrti, on the other hand, strikes me as a realist. And there is
no doubt at all that Vasubandhu, at least while writing the
Abhidharmakośa‚ was a realist. 

The Buddha himself? Very hard to say. The realists among us would be
inclined to say that it is either true or false that the Buddha was a
realist but that we lack the evidence to decide whether or not he was.
The anti-realists would be inclined to say that the
realist/anti-realist debate has taken place in modern analytic
philosophy and that it would be anachronistic to pin either one of
these positions on the Buddha, so there is no truth to the matter of
wheree he stood on this issue. 

And what of various Chan/Zen "thinkers". Are they realists or
anti-realists? (Whichever they are, they deserve to be denigrated by
denizens!)

If you have any thoughts on this (or any other) matter, please share
them with the universe, so that Jim Peavler may finally get some
e-mail. 

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://dayamati.blogspot.com
http://dayamati.home.comcast.net
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes