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

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Richard Hayes schreef:
> 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.
>   
The discussion is about synthetic propositions, I suppose? No present 
bald kings of France and self referring propositions? Because those 
would make the position of realist very difficult indeed.
> 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. 
>
>
>   
Aren't the avyak.rtaas an indication of Gautama's antirealism?


-- 


Erik

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