October 9, 2024 • 40 mins
Nilanjan Das joins host Melissa Gismondi for a conversation about the philosophical prowess of Udayana, a Sanskrit philosopher from the late 10th and early 11th centuries, who Das compares to Immanuel Kant and Aristotle in terms of his influence on Indian philosophy. Das also discusses the need for a broader understanding of philosophy that includes different traditions and perspectives, arguing for the importance of studying Sanskrit philosophy in philosophy departments rather than religious studies departments. Nilanjan Das was one of the JHI's 2023-24 Faculty Research Fellows and his research focused on the problem of induction in the history of Sanskrit philosophy—the problem of how we can justifiably draw conclusions about what we haven’t observed on the basis of what we have observed. Host Melissa Gismondi was the JHI's 2020-21 New Media and Public Humanities Fellow.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Musical Intro
Nilanjan Das (00:06):
I think people are yet to come to terms with Udayana's philosophical prowess.
Melissa Gismondi (00:13):
This is Nilanjan Das. He's an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, and a former JHI Faculty Research Fellow. The Sanskrit philosopher Nilanjan's talking about, Udayana, lived in India during the late 10th and early 11th centuries. Nilanjan has compared him to German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and even Aristotle in terms of his influence on Indian philosophy.
Nilanjan Das (00:42):
So the Mimamsaka starts by saying, how even is this the case given that there is a refutation for God's existence? To explain, if God were to exist, then he would be apprehended.
Melissa Gismondi (00:57):
Here, Nilanjan's reading from his own translation of one of Udayana's texts.
Nilanjan Das (01:03):
That's the Mimamsaka's position. So the Nayaika, Udayana himself, responds
Melissa Gismondi (01:18):
In the passage, Udayana describes a debate he's having.
Nilanjan Das (01:22):
So the thought is when it comes to unobservable entities, mere lack of perceptual apprehension is not evidence for non-existence. So that's the initial setup, and then the Charvaka comes in. So Charvaka says, what's the point of being attached to the qualifier that is observability? Something that isn't apprehended doesn't exist, what is otherwise exists, but God and the like aren't like this, so they don't exist. This is the better option.
Melissa Gismondi (02:05):
The Charvaka's argument suggests that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. In other words, God doesn't exist because there's no evidence that God exists. But Udayana and Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume, many centuries after him, were interested in problematizing this idea and applying principles to it. I'm Melissa Gismondi, and this is Humanities at Large from the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. Over the course of this season, we're exploring the theme of Absence through the work of JHI researchers. Today we're looking at two kinds of absences through a philosopher's lens.
(02:57):
The first relates to absence and philosophical theories, and in particular, epistemology, the question of how we know what we know. But there's another absence too, and that's the absence of diverse voices in what's considered "philosophy". If you're like me, your first experience with philosophy might've been in a high school or university class, but speaking to Nilanjan at the JHI studios in May, I was surprised to learn that his engagement with big philosophical questions started many years earlier.
Nilanjan Das (03:35):
One of the first philosophy books that I read was a Bengali introduction to the philosophy of the Charvaka materialists. These philosophers were materialists in so far as they thought that the only things that actually exist are the four material elements, earth, air, fire, and wind. And they thought everything else which we might want to posit like consciousness, et cetera, can either be reduced to these elements or emerges out of these elements. So those are not fundamental things.
(04:10):
And when it comes to other stuff, like things we cannot observe at all in any way, for instance, the existence of God or an afterlife, these people thought, "Well, we have no reason to posit those things." So that seemed like a very radical view when I first encountered it as maybe around 10 or 11 years old.
Melissa Gismondi (04:30):
Wow. That's young.
Nilanjan Das (04:33):
So that really was my first introduction to philosophy in general and also to Indian philosophy.
Melissa Gismondi (04:38):
I mean, it's remarkable to me that you were 10 or 11. Was there something about how you remember seeing the world or engaging with the world at that age? I guess I'm asking because kids are really good with just being open-minded and asking questions, which seems to me to be the heart of philosophy in a way.
Nilanjan Das (04:58):
So I felt that there was something right about this view. So I still have the same materialist sympathies, but I also thought the argument was a bit bonkers at the same time because essentially what the argument boiled down to was the fact that because we don't see these things, we have no reason to posit them and we have to get rid of them. So the Charvakas say really radical things, not just that there's no God or afterlife, but also that they run a causal relations.
(05:28):
There is no such thing as causal necessity, and that seemed extremely strong to me even at that age. And this might have been coloured by the way the view was presented, but so my reaction to it was both immediate attraction to the view, and at the same time incredulity. And I think that has always been my response to most philosophical ideas.
Melissa Gismondi (05:54):
You've said that when you were applying to graduate schools, there were a few programmes outside of India that taught Sanskrit philosophy, and so you shifted your focus to epistemology. This question, which we've sort of already been engaging with, this question of how we know what we know. Why do you think it's so important?
Nilanjan Das (06:15):
So there are two parts of the question, right? So one thing is that yes, it is true that when I was applying to grad school from India, there weren't many philosophy departments—I want to put at the emphasis on philosophy—there weren't many philosophy departments which taught Indian philosophy. There were South Asian studies departments, there were religion departments that taught the same material, but not in the... Philosophy departments typically in the North America or the UK did not have people who could do this.
(06:46):
Things have fortunately changed, but I was at the same time interested in epistemology growing up because I learned quite a bit of Nyaya, which is this Sanskrit epistemological tradition. I thought I would do something on epistemology or philosophy of language on issues I was already familiar with from the Indian context, but there were no places where I could do that kind of work, which is why I went on to do a PhD in epistemology. But within the sort of framework that contemporary analytic philosophers nowadays use.
(07:20):
Now going back to the final part of your question, which is the question of how do we know what we know? That seems like a universal theme across many different traditions of philosophy. So we know, for example, an introductory class on philosophy here would start with the problem of scepticism, but maybe with a figure like Descartes. But by no means is it the case that Descartes is the first person to have thought of that problem. There were figures, for example, in the Islamic tradition like Al-Ghazali, and then also in the Indian tradition figures like Nagarjuna and others who raised the same sort of question in other forms.
(08:13):
And so it seems like cross culturally, all philosophers seems to be thinking about the same themes. And I think the reason why that question seemed so important to them is that I think all of these thinkers thought that there are these natural lines of reasoning which would lead us to this really radical conclusion, that really we don't know that we know anything or maybe even stronger, that we actually don't know anything at all. And that seems to me what unifies these thinkers together.
Melissa Gismondi (08:40):
So you mentioned that you could study Sanskrit philosophy in maybe a religious studies department or a South Asian. Tell me a little bit about the distinction between what it would mean to engage in it with Sanskrit philosophy in a religious studies department versus a philosophy department.
Nilanjan Das (08:57):
So traditionally, and this is I think has to do with the way Indian philosophy has been thought of amongst philosophers, is that there's a kind of an orientalist conception of Indian philosophy that came into existence around in the early decades of the 20th century. Largely the idea was that Indian philosophy does not really involve rational inquiry. It has to do with mystical intuition into certain truths about the world.
Melissa Gismondi (09:27):
Spirituality.
Nilanjan Das (09:28):
Spirituality. And the thought was that in that respect, it's radically different to what we call western philosophy, a philosophy that comes out of Europe, basically. Now, that view was attacked in the second half of the 20th century by lots of different people, especially people like JN Mohanty and BK Matilal. The interesting thing is that because of the position of these people in various ways, like their institutional affiliations and so on, it did not really make an impact. It did not really make philosophy departments in North America or UK hospitable to Indian philosophy.
(10:11):
And that I think is actually both a loss for these departments and a bad thing for Indian philosophy because there are plenty of traditions in Indian philosophy which engage in precisely the same kind of rational inquiry that contemporary philosophers are doing when they write papers or books. Basically the aim is to clearly state arguments, assess those arguments and keep this going. So that emphasis on argumentation, that I think was missing, not always, but in large part when the Indian philosophical texts were studied, for instance, in area studies departments or religious studies department.
(10:55):
Because the focus there is on intellectual history or history of religion rather than on the philosophical substance of the texts themselves.
Melissa Gismondi (11:03):
So here at the JHI, you've been working on a project about the problem of induction and including the history of Indian philosophy. The problem of induction, as I understand it, is often attributed to the Scottish enlightenment thinker David Hume. Can you walk us through the idea as Hume presented it?
Nilanjan Das (11:33):
Absolutely. So induction, strictly speaking in this context, refers to a kind of inference. So it is the inference from observed facts, from observed facts to unobserved phenomena. So I'll just give two quick examples. So the thought will be, suppose I've seen lots and lots of emeralds and I've observed all of them to be green. So on the basis of that, I can conclude either all emeralds are green, which is a universal generalisation about emeralds, or that the next emerald I will see will be green, which is again an unobserved, like a conclusion whose content is unobserved.
(12:20):
It's not a universal generalisation, it's about a particular emerald I will observe. In either case, what's happening is that we are moving from what we have observed to what has not been observed. Now, Hume was concerned with explaining how we formed justified beliefs, reasonable beliefs about these unobserved conclusions. So he was thinking, "Well, the only way we could be justified in believing these conclusions is if we could presuppose or justifiably believe something else about nature more generally." Namely, that nature is uniform, which again, we can spell it out as the idea that unobserved phenomena will resemble observed phenomena.
(13:09):
So there's a kind of uniformity of nature, so that what we have observed in nature carries over to the unobserved parts of nature. Hume argued that we actually cannot justifiably believe that uniformity of nature holds because first of all, it's not something that we can know, a priori independently of experience. We can surely imagine worlds where the unobserved parts of nature don't resemble the observed parts of nature. So it has to be on the basis of experience. Now, experience again, does not straightforwardly tell us, we only see parts of nature, so it doesn't tell us anything about the unobserved parts of nature.
(13:58):
So experience does not directly justify us in believing this, the uniformity of nature. So how do we know on the basis of our experiences that uniformity of nature holds? One proposal might be you make another inductive inference, but then for that too, we would have to be justified in believing uniformity of nature. So that makes the reasoning circular. So this gives Hume the conclusion that we can't be justified in believing uniformity of nature, but that means we cannot also be justified in believing the conclusions of this inductive inferences.
Melissa Gismondi (14:36):
So in the experience piece, because I've experienced emeralds as green that I'm assuming that they're always going to be green, which is applying a uniformity of nature, but there's a future component to this that I don't have direct experience with.
Nilanjan Das (14:55):
Yes, exactly. So lots of people have tried to obviously solve this. Some just accept that we don't have any justification for accepting this principle, but it's somehow pragmatically motivated, some things are part of our practises and so on. Hume's problem is I think such a stubborn problem that it's really bothered people, and I don't think there's any really satisfying solution to it, or at least a solution to it, which is satisfying by Hume's own lights.
Melissa Gismondi (15:27):
So is that what makes it... I've read that it's considered one of the most profound challenges in philosophy and Bertrand Russell, the 20th century philosopher said if the problem can't be solved, "There is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity."
Nilanjan Das (15:43):
That's his solution. I guess that's because pretty much all the time in planning actions, we rely on something like uniformity of nature. So I'm planning my day tomorrow on the assumption that the sun will rise tomorrow. How do I know this? Or how do I justifiably believe this? On the basis of an inductive inference, the sun has risen in the past. That's what I've observed. So the sun will rise tomorrow.
Melissa Gismondi (16:14):
And if you take that away, there's kind of a paralysis. So I want to shift now to what your research is adding to this discussion, and in particular, you're looking at the problem of induction through the lens of a thinker from Indian philosophy, Udayana. Who was he and what do we know about him?
Nilanjan Das (16:48):
So as in the case of many Indian philosophers of this period, we don't know very much about him
Melissa Gismondi (16:55):
And what period exactly?
Nilanjan Das (16:56):
So from what we know from the manuscripts that are available, I think the correct date for him would be the end of the 10th century to maybe the first part of the 11th century. So we have some information about where he lived, for instance, according to the later tradition, he was from Mithila, which is in present day Bihar. So the reason why he's such an important figure in the history of Indian philosophy is that he unified two different philosophical traditions into one systematic whole. So the two traditions were Nyaya and Vaisheshika.
(17:37):
So Nyaya was this epistemological tradition which grew out of the text called Nyaya Sutra, and which was concerned with the theory of rational inquiry or debate. On the other hand, Vaisheshika system, it's largely devoted to ontology and metaphysics where the aim was to lay down the structure of reality, say what actually exists. And so Udayana, what he did was he unified these two traditions into one systematic whole, and that was really influential because that's how later thinkers within those traditions started thinking about the two traditions.
(18:16):
The other really important thing about Udayana is that he's one of the last critiques of Buddhism in India. So Buddhism in India ended around the 13th century when the Buddhists migrated to other parts of the world. But Udayana is credited with one of the last really influential critiques of Buddhist epistemology and metaphysics. It's sometimes translated as an analysis of the truth of the nature of the self, where he systematically goes to various arguments that Buddhists could give against the existence of a substantial self. So these are two respects in which he's kind of real influential within the Sanskrit philosophical tradition.
Melissa Gismondi (19:00):
So let's dig in a little bit to that and where absence comes into these debates, because as I understand it, as you were just explaining with the Buddhists, there was this debate over the existence of God, the existence of the self as you were saying. Tell us a bit more about that and how absence comes into it.
Nilanjan Das (19:19):
Let's take the Buddhists for instance. So the Buddhists deny the existence of a substantial self, a self which is a substance and exists independently of other things. Now, when philosophers gave arguments for the non-existence of the self, like Buddhist philosophers especially, they often appealed to the idea that we don't really have any way of knowing that there is a substantial self. So these are arguments from ignorance. So basically they proceed from the claim that we have no means of knowing that there is a substantial self to the conclusion that there is no substantial self.
(20:06):
Similarly, there are others within this tradition who give similar arguments about the existence of God, for instance. Since we have no means of knowing that there is a God, there's neither perception of God nor any inference about God. Therefore, from that, we can conclude that there is no God. So that kind of inference, as many recognised, relies on a questionable principle which says that, "Well, whenever you have no means of knowing that a certain thing exists, you can conclude that the thing does not exist." It's not obvious that that's true. For example, right now there might be a storm happening on the surface of Mars, and I have no means of knowing that.
(20:51):
I can neither infer it nor perceive it, but that doesn't mean there is no such storm happening. So arguments from ignorance have a general structure, which is that we first show that there is absence of evidence for something, and then we take the fact that the evidence for that thing is absent to be itself evidence for the absence of that thing. So the idea would be, well, for example, Hume himself gives arguments of this sort. It's kind of reminiscent of the Buddhists really. So he says, "Well, when I introspect, when I think about my own mental states or when I look inward, all I see are the thoughts and the feelings and the sensations that are happening.
(21:36):
I never notice myself, I never notice a self, a subject who stands behind those fleeting mental states and could count as the bearer of those mental states." And from that, he concludes that there is no such self. So in all these cases, what people are doing is that they're appealing to the absence of evidence of something to show that the thing really does not exist or is absent right now. The interesting thing is that typically people also recognise that these arguments are bad. That storm on Mars example really shows that.
(22:17):
So the question is when we can ask the questions in a slightly different way where we say, "Well, yes, we know that the simple principle or the simple slogan which says that absence of evidence is evidence for absence. That's false." We know this from these storm on Mars type examples. But then still given that people seem to use a principle of that kind, we can ask what version of that principle is true. Now in the Sanskrit context, there were philosophers who thought that at least we can put some restrictions on that idea, that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
(22:59):
So the simplest of the restrictions is that take the case of observation, the fact that we don't observe an entity doesn't mean that it does not exist. So to apply this to the case of say, atomic or subatomic particles, which we cannot observe with our bare eyes, the fact that we don't observe them with our bare eyes does not mean that they don't exist. Seems pretty reasonable. And they thought that this principle is kind important because a lot of their opponents, for instance, like the Charvaka materialists who we were talking about earlier, or the Buddhists sometimes seem to suggest that the mere fact that we don't observe the self or an afterlife means that these things don't exist.
(23:59):
So mere non-observation cannot be a decisive reason for ruling out the existence of something. That's the principle that these people like to endorse.
Melissa Gismondi (24:09):
So would they have defined observable by sight or what other ways do you think?
Nilanjan Das (24:15):
Typically, in this context we have a more expansive notion of observation. People do talk about observing atoms, for example, these days in laboratories, but this is much earlier, when people did have a more restricted notion of what is observable. So in this case, it's like what is observable by our sense faculties alone without anything that assists them.
Melissa Gismondi (24:46):
Although the problem of induction is usually traced to David Hume, Nilanjan's research showcases how thinkers like Udayana were wrestling with a different version of the problem long before him.
Nilanjan Das (24:59):
So the interesting thing is that maybe to make the connection with Hume a bit more explicit, the principle that I just mentioned, the principle which says that, "Well, if something is unobservable, the fact that there is no observational evidence for it does not count as evidence for its absence or non-existence." So this idea poses a problem of inductive knowledge in this context, which is very different in some ways from Hume's problem, but at the same time quite similar enough so that we might recognise it as a problem of induction. So the thought is that, let's go back to the emeralds example.
(25:40):
Suppose I've seen lots and lots of emeralds and they all appear to be green. So I could conclude that all emeralds are green. So in doing so, we not only might form a justified belief that all emeralds are green, but also we might come to know correctly that all emeralds are green, right? So the problem essentially is that how did I come to know that all emeralds are green? Obviously by observing emeralds. But a crucial part of it seems to be that I also did not observe any emerald that is not green, and in coming to believe or know that all emeralds are green, I am ruling out the possibility that there are emeralds which are spatiotemporally distant from me, which are not green.
(26:36):
So I'm ruling out the possibility of non-green emeralds in parts of the world, which I have not observed or could not observe. So the question that the Sanskrit philosophers ask is what gives you the right to do it? Now if you say, "Well, it's because I've never observed a non-green emerald." But that's like appealing to the lack of observational evidence for something.
Melissa Gismondi (27:02):
The ignorance piece.
Nilanjan Das (27:03):
To say that, "Well, lack of observational evidence is enough to rule out the existence of this kind of spatiotemporally distant, non-green emerald." But note that because these non-green emeralds by hypothesis are located in parts of the world that I could not observe, they're unobservable for me. But surely we can't rule out the existence of unobservable entities simply by appealing to the lack of observational evidence for them, as in the case of atoms. So the principle, it seemed very reasonable, creates a problem for induction in this case. So if that principle, which seemed very reasonable is correct, then we cannot have inductive knowledge.
(27:46):
And so this is a new version, I would say, or a different version of the problem of induction from the one that Hume was concerned with. So one thing I wanted to mention is that though we are talking about a particular author who articulates this problem very clearly, Udayana in the 10th to the 11th century, the problem has a larger history. Actually, it goes back to the Charvaka materialists I started talking about.
Melissa Gismondi (27:14):
When were they?
Nilanjan Das (28:16):
This is unclear, but there is one text for instance, written in the 8th century by an author who identifies as a Charvaka called Jayarashi who states a version of this problem of induction. And the versions of the problem, we're already familiar by the 7th century at least. There's a Buddhist philosopher called Dharmakirti who explicitly formulates a problem in a certain way and then tries to give a solution to it. So I would say this problem predates Hume at least by a thousand years.
Melissa Gismondi (28:56):
It's hard to overstate Udayana's significance in terms of his influence on Indian philosophy, but you'd be hard-pressed to find Udayana taught in an intro to philosophy class here in Canada.
Nilanjan Das (29:08):
So most of these texts are not available in translation, and even when they are available in translations, these translations are done by philologists or indologists who are writing for a certain kind of audience. They're not written for philosophy students or non-specialists who want to understand what the arguments are. Even in the secondary literature, when people are writing about this argument, again, because these are not written by philosophers, they are presented in a way which is not easily accessible to philosophy students.
(29:40):
So in all those respects, I think there's a problem here where we just don't have the material to introduce philosophy students to these ideas. And so a lot of the work that needs to be done in our area is just of producing translations and good articles or book chapters or books which lay out the arguments much more clearly perspicuously so that philosophers may take them up and engage with them.
Melissa Gismondi (30:09):
You said earlier that for instance, you wanting to study Sanskrit texts in a philosophy department, that that's gotten better. What about philosophy writ large? My sense is that there's still a perception that "philosophy" comes from Europe, comes from Kant and Aristotle. When I took philosophy classes, I think the only non-white author I read was maybe Fanon. What's the state of it now, would you say?
Nilanjan Das (30:40):
So I think things have really changed in the last decade or so. People do recognise the need to engage with other traditions and not just be restricted. I think that needs to happen at two very different levels. One is departments should employ people who can teach this material obviously, but at the same time, there should be material to teach. I think we need to sort of expand efforts in both directions, like hiring people who can teach this material, the Sanskrit stuff, but also at the same time making the Sanskrit stuff available so that even non-specialists can read it.
(31:20):
For example, if I'm teaching, let's say introduction to philosophy for first years, I might include some Plato in this syllabus, but I don't have to be an expert on Plato to teach Plato, and we don't have material of this kind yet. At least not as much material as there should be, for instance, when it comes to teaching Indian philosophy.
Melissa Gismondi (31:45):
I'm curious how you think philosophy would change if Sanskrit philosophers, Sanskrit texts we're taught more in departments, and I'm thinking not just of who or what is considered philosophy, but also the ideas and themes that students taking these classes, for instance, would engage with.
Nilanjan Das (32:05):
So I think there are two things, right? As you were saying, there's a distorted conception of philosophy, that it starts with Plato and it keeps going. There's a kind of narrative about philosophy, which is an extremely Eurocentric way of thinking about the history of philosophy. So obviously including this material more generally from any tradition really outside of this, like the Chinese tradition or the Indian tradition would obviously undermine that distorted conception of the history of philosophy. That's a given.
(32:38):
However, one question which I think often comes up is that what would be the point of undermining that distorted conception of philosophy? Why is that a useful thing for philosophy itself for philosophers? I think it's because often these other traditions have ideas or arguments or theories to offer, which would enrich the discussion of the same ideas or theories or arguments in other traditions. So the thought is that suppose we are teaching the problem of induction, taking seriously what Udayana or Dharmakirti or other Indian philosophers had to say about induction can help us see certain aspects of the problem more clearly than others.
(33:27):
For example, if I'm interested in knowing how important is the uniformity of nature to the problem of induction or to the possibility of inductive knowledge. If it turns out that we can show that inductive knowledge is impossible in another way without appealing to the uniformity of nature, that just shows that maybe Hume's way of posing the problem is not the only way of posing the problem. So it helps us at least get clearer on what the problem might be or how different problems of induction are distinguished from each other. All we are doing as philosophers is trying to understand the conceptual geography around certain themes, like how different concepts fit together or how different arguments fit together.
(34:15):
What does the space of theoretical possibilities look like? So if we're bad cartographers, we'll just restrict ourselves to a certain part of the ocean and never venture outwards. But then there is this bigger picture of philosophy which encompasses all these different traditions, which allows us to get a better sense of what the conceptual terrain looks like.
Melissa Gismondi (34:48):
There's no shortage of debates these days about what is or isn't true. So many of the themes philosophy engages with, scepticism, evidence and that age-old question of how do we know what we know—they seem more important now than ever before. So I asked Nilanjan what comes to mind when he looks at how knowledge is being assessed in today's world?
Nilanjan Das (35:12):
So one thing that I find very interesting about contemporary debates is that often there are two things happening. One is that there's a kind of a distinction we can make that fits some philosophers make between epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. Where epistemic bubbles are basically spaces or communities where essentially no information from the outside gets in. So it's basically places where people come up with their views about the world without looking at all the available information. The other case is where information does get in, but it is treated with this distrust.
(35:55):
So there's an inequality of epistemic credit. The way epistemic credit is assigned to the testimony, let's say, of people within the community and the testimony of people outside of the community. And I think that distinction is really important because it means that even if we are engaging in, let's say I live in an echo chamber and I'm engaging in a debate with someone outside of my echo chamber, I might understand what the arguments are that other people are giving. I just don't trust what they're saying. So I don't trust the premises of the argument, so I'm not going to be convinced by the argument.
(36:36):
So this is where I think it's kind of interesting to contrast this with a different model of public discourse in which I think we get from a lot of deep discussions of debates in Sanskrit philosophy where it seems to me that there's already a way of counterbalancing the harmful effects of people forming echo chambers, where they keep distrusting each other by setting up certain rules of debate where people have to proceed always from the common ground. Well, for example, this is the Nyaya epistemological tradition to which Udayana, for example, belongs.
(37:15):
So one of the rules in the Nyaya epistemological tradition is that whenever you give examples to support your premises, those examples have to be public examples. They have to be examples that everyone will accept. So by setting up these rules, the aim is to narrow the stock of evidence or restrict the stock of evidence that you can appeal to in the debate so that everyone accepts that body of evidence to be evidence. And well, I'm not sure whether that actually helps us make progress, but it's an interesting solution I think to a lot of the problems that we see.
(37:54):
For example, when it comes to disinformation and misinformation, where essentially often the way people are misinformed is not because they are not looking at other information, but rather because they don't trust the information from certain sources or trust them less than this trust information from the sources that they prefer. And the thought is that well, by maybe narrowing the stock of information that we can appeal to in a certain way, we are going to restrict the moves we can make in a debate so that people don't talk past each other essentially.
Melissa Gismondi (38:29):
Interesting. I just had the image of chess knowing the rules of how to argue. So it sounds like with Udayana and the rules that they'd set out, there was already an intrinsic degree to which they're speaking a common language, even if they're disagreeing, which we don't have so much of today.
Nilanjan Das (38:52):
So I think this comes up quite a bit in the context of religious debates, for instance, when people are debating the existence of God. Where even there the aim... Even though people obviously will disagree with certain principles or premises that are being put forward in these arguments, the thought is that you cannot appeal to evidence while supporting these premises, which other party won't accept. So there should be a common stock of evidence, and the thought is that's how we can make progress in a debate not otherwise.
Melissa Gismondi (39:32):
Nilanjan Das is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. He was a JHI Faculty Research Fellow for 2023 to 2024. Humanities at Large is brought to you by the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe, share this episode and leave us a five star review. It really helps to get the word out. I'm Melissa Gismondi and I'll be back in two weeks. Thanks for listening.
Musical Intro
Nilanjan Das (00:06):
I think people are yet to come to terms with Udayana's philosophical prowess.
Melissa Gismondi (00:13):
This is Nilanjan Das. He's an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, and a former JHI Faculty Research Fellow. The Sanskrit philosopher Nilanjan's talking about, Udayana, lived in India during the late 10th and early 11th centuries. Nilanjan has compared him to German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and even Aristotle in terms of his influence on Indian philosophy.
Nilanjan Das (00:42):
So the Mimamsaka starts by saying, how even is this the case given that there is a refutation for God's existence? To explain, if God were to exist, then he would be apprehended.
Melissa Gismondi (00:57):
Here, Nilanjan's reading from his own translation of one of Udayana's texts.
Nilanjan Das (01:03):
That's the Mimamsaka's position. So the Nayaika, Udayana himself, responds
Melissa Gismondi (01:18):
In the passage, Udayana describes a debate he's having.
Nilanjan Das (01:22):
So the thought is when it comes to unobservable entities, mere lack of perceptual apprehension is not evidence for non-existence. So that's the initial setup, and then the Charvaka comes in. So Charvaka says, what's the point of being attached to the qualifier that is observability? Something that isn't apprehended doesn't exist, what is otherwise exists, but God and the like aren't like this, so they don't exist. This is the better option.
Melissa Gismondi (02:05):
The Charvaka's argument suggests that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. In other words, God doesn't exist because there's no evidence that God exists. But Udayana and Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume, many centuries after him, were interested in problematizing this idea and applying principles to it. I'm Melissa Gismondi, and this is Humanities at Large from the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. Over the course of this season, we're exploring the theme of Absence through the work of JHI researchers. Today we're looking at two kinds of absences through a philosopher's lens.
(02:57):
The first relates to absence and philosophical theories, and in particular, epistemology, the question of how we know what we know. But there's another absence too, and that's the absence of diverse voices in what's considered "philosophy". If you're like me, your first experience with philosophy might've been in a high school or university class, but speaking to Nilanjan at the JHI studios in May, I was surprised to learn that his engagement with big philosophical questions started many years earlier.
Nilanjan Das (03:35):
One of the first philosophy books that I read was a Bengali introduction to the philosophy of the Charvaka materialists. These philosophers were materialists in so far as they thought that the only things that actually exist are the four material elements, earth, air, fire, and wind. And they thought everything else which we might want to posit like consciousness, et cetera, can either be reduced to these elements or emerges out of these elements. So those are not fundamental things.
(04:10):
And when it comes to other stuff, like things we cannot observe at all in any way, for instance, the existence of God or an afterlife, these people thought, "Well, we have no reason to posit those things." So that seemed like a very radical view when I first encountered it as maybe around 10 or 11 years old.
Melissa Gismondi (04:30):
Wow. That's young.
Nilanjan Das (04:33):
So that really was my first introduction to philosophy in general and also to Indian philosophy.
Melissa Gismondi (04:38):
I mean, it's remarkable to me that you were 10 or 11. Was there something about how you remember seeing the world or engaging with the world at that age? I guess I'm asking because kids are really good with just being open-minded and asking questions, which seems to me to be the heart of philosophy in a way.
Nilanjan Das (04:58):
So I felt that there was something right about this view. So I still have the same materialist sympathies, but I also thought the argument was a bit bonkers at the same time because essentially what the argument boiled down to was the fact that because we don't see these things, we have no reason to posit them and we have to get rid of them. So the Charvakas say really radical things, not just that there's no God or afterlife, but also that they run a causal relations.
(05:28):
There is no such thing as causal necessity, and that seemed extremely strong to me even at that age. And this might have been coloured by the way the view was presented, but so my reaction to it was both immediate attraction to the view, and at the same time incredulity. And I think that has always been my response to most philosophical ideas.
Melissa Gismondi (05:54):
You've said that when you were applying to graduate schools, there were a few programmes outside of India that taught Sanskrit philosophy, and so you shifted your focus to epistemology. This question, which we've sort of already been engaging with, this question of how we know what we know. Why do you think it's so important?
Nilanjan Das (06:15):
So there are two parts of the question, right? So one thing is that yes, it is true that when I was applying to grad school from India, there weren't many philosophy departments—I want to put at the emphasis on philosophy—there weren't many philosophy departments which taught Indian philosophy. There were South Asian studies departments, there were religion departments that taught the same material, but not in the... Philosophy departments typically in the North America or the UK did not have people who could do this.
(06:46):
Things have fortunately changed, but I was at the same time interested in epistemology growing up because I learned quite a bit of Nyaya, which is this Sanskrit epistemological tradition. I thought I would do something on epistemology or philosophy of language on issues I was already familiar with from the Indian context, but there were no places where I could do that kind of work, which is why I went on to do a PhD in epistemology. But within the sort of framework that contemporary analytic philosophers nowadays use.
(07:20):
Now going back to the final part of your question, which is the question of how do we know what we know? That seems like a universal theme across many different traditions of philosophy. So we know, for example, an introductory class on philosophy here would start with the problem of scepticism, but maybe with a figure like Descartes. But by no means is it the case that Descartes is the first person to have thought of that problem. There were figures, for example, in the Islamic tradition like Al-Ghazali, and then also in the Indian tradition figures like Nagarjuna and others who raised the same sort of question in other forms.
(08:13):
And so it seems like cross culturally, all philosophers seems to be thinking about the same themes. And I think the reason why that question seemed so important to them is that I think all of these thinkers thought that there are these natural lines of reasoning which would lead us to this really radical conclusion, that really we don't know that we know anything or maybe even stronger, that we actually don't know anything at all. And that seems to me what unifies these thinkers together.
Melissa Gismondi (08:40):
So you mentioned that you could study Sanskrit philosophy in maybe a religious studies department or a South Asian. Tell me a little bit about the distinction between what it would mean to engage in it with Sanskrit philosophy in a religious studies department versus a philosophy department.
Nilanjan Das (08:57):
So traditionally, and this is I think has to do with the way Indian philosophy has been thought of amongst philosophers, is that there's a kind of an orientalist conception of Indian philosophy that came into existence around in the early decades of the 20th century. Largely the idea was that Indian philosophy does not really involve rational inquiry. It has to do with mystical intuition into certain truths about the world.
Melissa Gismondi (09:27):
Spirituality.
Nilanjan Das (09:28):
Spirituality. And the thought was that in that respect, it's radically different to what we call western philosophy, a philosophy that comes out of Europe, basically. Now, that view was attacked in the second half of the 20th century by lots of different people, especially people like JN Mohanty and BK Matilal. The interesting thing is that because of the position of these people in various ways, like their institutional affiliations and so on, it did not really make an impact. It did not really make philosophy departments in North America or UK hospitable to Indian philosophy.
(10:11):
And that I think is actually both a loss for these departments and a bad thing for Indian philosophy because there are plenty of traditions in Indian philosophy which engage in precisely the same kind of rational inquiry that contemporary philosophers are doing when they write papers or books. Basically the aim is to clearly state arguments, assess those arguments and keep this going. So that emphasis on argumentation, that I think was missing, not always, but in large part when the Indian philosophical texts were studied, for instance, in area studies departments or religious studies department.
(10:55):
Because the focus there is on intellectual history or history of religion rather than on the philosophical substance of the texts themselves.
Melissa Gismondi (11:03):
So here at the JHI, you've been working on a project about the problem of induction and including the history of Indian philosophy. The problem of induction, as I understand it, is often attributed to the Scottish enlightenment thinker David Hume. Can you walk us through the idea as Hume presented it?
Nilanjan Das (11:33):
Absolutely. So induction, strictly speaking in this context, refers to a kind of inference. So it is the inference from observed facts, from observed facts to unobserved phenomena. So I'll just give two quick examples. So the thought will be, suppose I've seen lots and lots of emeralds and I've observed all of them to be green. So on the basis of that, I can conclude either all emeralds are green, which is a universal generalisation about emeralds, or that the next emerald I will see will be green, which is again an unobserved, like a conclusion whose content is unobserved.
(12:20):
It's not a universal generalisation, it's about a particular emerald I will observe. In either case, what's happening is that we are moving from what we have observed to what has not been observed. Now, Hume was concerned with explaining how we formed justified beliefs, reasonable beliefs about these unobserved conclusions. So he was thinking, "Well, the only way we could be justified in believing these conclusions is if we could presuppose or justifiably believe something else about nature more generally." Namely, that nature is uniform, which again, we can spell it out as the idea that unobserved phenomena will resemble observed phenomena.
(13:09):
So there's a kind of uniformity of nature, so that what we have observed in nature carries over to the unobserved parts of nature. Hume argued that we actually cannot justifiably believe that uniformity of nature holds because first of all, it's not something that we can know, a priori independently of experience. We can surely imagine worlds where the unobserved parts of nature don't resemble the observed parts of nature. So it has to be on the basis of experience. Now, experience again, does not straightforwardly tell us, we only see parts of nature, so it doesn't tell us anything about the unobserved parts of nature.
(13:58):
So experience does not directly justify us in believing this, the uniformity of nature. So how do we know on the basis of our experiences that uniformity of nature holds? One proposal might be you make another inductive inference, but then for that too, we would have to be justified in believing uniformity of nature. So that makes the reasoning circular. So this gives Hume the conclusion that we can't be justified in believing uniformity of nature, but that means we cannot also be justified in believing the conclusions of this inductive inferences.
Melissa Gismondi (14:36):
So in the experience piece, because I've experienced emeralds as green that I'm assuming that they're always going to be green, which is applying a uniformity of nature, but there's a future component to this that I don't have direct experience with.
Nilanjan Das (14:55):
Yes, exactly. So lots of people have tried to obviously solve this. Some just accept that we don't have any justification for accepting this principle, but it's somehow pragmatically motivated, some things are part of our practises and so on. Hume's problem is I think such a stubborn problem that it's really bothered people, and I don't think there's any really satisfying solution to it, or at least a solution to it, which is satisfying by Hume's own lights.
Melissa Gismondi (15:27):
So is that what makes it... I've read that it's considered one of the most profound challenges in philosophy and Bertrand Russell, the 20th century philosopher said if the problem can't be solved, "There is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity."
Nilanjan Das (15:43):
That's his solution. I guess that's because pretty much all the time in planning actions, we rely on something like uniformity of nature. So I'm planning my day tomorrow on the assumption that the sun will rise tomorrow. How do I know this? Or how do I justifiably believe this? On the basis of an inductive inference, the sun has risen in the past. That's what I've observed. So the sun will rise tomorrow.
Melissa Gismondi (16:14):
And if you take that away, there's kind of a paralysis. So I want to shift now to what your research is adding to this discussion, and in particular, you're looking at the problem of induction through the lens of a thinker from Indian philosophy, Udayana. Who was he and what do we know about him?
Nilanjan Das (16:48):
So as in the case of many Indian philosophers of this period, we don't know very much about him
Melissa Gismondi (16:55):
And what period exactly?
Nilanjan Das (16:56):
So from what we know from the manuscripts that are available, I think the correct date for him would be the end of the 10th century to maybe the first part of the 11th century. So we have some information about where he lived, for instance, according to the later tradition, he was from Mithila, which is in present day Bihar. So the reason why he's such an important figure in the history of Indian philosophy is that he unified two different philosophical traditions into one systematic whole. So the two traditions were Nyaya and Vaisheshika.
(17:37):
So Nyaya was this epistemological tradition which grew out of the text called Nyaya Sutra, and which was concerned with the theory of rational inquiry or debate. On the other hand, Vaisheshika system, it's largely devoted to ontology and metaphysics where the aim was to lay down the structure of reality, say what actually exists. And so Udayana, what he did was he unified these two traditions into one systematic whole, and that was really influential because that's how later thinkers within those traditions started thinking about the two traditions.
(18:16):
The other really important thing about Udayana is that he's one of the last critiques of Buddhism in India. So Buddhism in India ended around the 13th century when the Buddhists migrated to other parts of the world. But Udayana is credited with one of the last really influential critiques of Buddhist epistemology and metaphysics. It's sometimes translated as an analysis of the truth of the nature of the self, where he systematically goes to various arguments that Buddhists could give against the existence of a substantial self. So these are two respects in which he's kind of real influential within the Sanskrit philosophical tradition.
Melissa Gismondi (19:00):
So let's dig in a little bit to that and where absence comes into these debates, because as I understand it, as you were just explaining with the Buddhists, there was this debate over the existence of God, the existence of the self as you were saying. Tell us a bit more about that and how absence comes into it.
Nilanjan Das (19:19):
Let's take the Buddhists for instance. So the Buddhists deny the existence of a substantial self, a self which is a substance and exists independently of other things. Now, when philosophers gave arguments for the non-existence of the self, like Buddhist philosophers especially, they often appealed to the idea that we don't really have any way of knowing that there is a substantial self. So these are arguments from ignorance. So basically they proceed from the claim that we have no means of knowing that there is a substantial self to the conclusion that there is no substantial self.
(20:06):
Similarly, there are others within this tradition who give similar arguments about the existence of God, for instance. Since we have no means of knowing that there is a God, there's neither perception of God nor any inference about God. Therefore, from that, we can conclude that there is no God. So that kind of inference, as many recognised, relies on a questionable principle which says that, "Well, whenever you have no means of knowing that a certain thing exists, you can conclude that the thing does not exist." It's not obvious that that's true. For example, right now there might be a storm happening on the surface of Mars, and I have no means of knowing that.
(20:51):
I can neither infer it nor perceive it, but that doesn't mean there is no such storm happening. So arguments from ignorance have a general structure, which is that we first show that there is absence of evidence for something, and then we take the fact that the evidence for that thing is absent to be itself evidence for the absence of that thing. So the idea would be, well, for example, Hume himself gives arguments of this sort. It's kind of reminiscent of the Buddhists really. So he says, "Well, when I introspect, when I think about my own mental states or when I look inward, all I see are the thoughts and the feelings and the sensations that are happening.
(21:36):
I never notice myself, I never notice a self, a subject who stands behind those fleeting mental states and could count as the bearer of those mental states." And from that, he concludes that there is no such self. So in all these cases, what people are doing is that they're appealing to the absence of evidence of something to show that the thing really does not exist or is absent right now. The interesting thing is that typically people also recognise that these arguments are bad. That storm on Mars example really shows that.
(22:17):
So the question is when we can ask the questions in a slightly different way where we say, "Well, yes, we know that the simple principle or the simple slogan which says that absence of evidence is evidence for absence. That's false." We know this from these storm on Mars type examples. But then still given that people seem to use a principle of that kind, we can ask what version of that principle is true. Now in the Sanskrit context, there were philosophers who thought that at least we can put some restrictions on that idea, that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
(22:59):
So the simplest of the restrictions is that take the case of observation, the fact that we don't observe an entity doesn't mean that it does not exist. So to apply this to the case of say, atomic or subatomic particles, which we cannot observe with our bare eyes, the fact that we don't observe them with our bare eyes does not mean that they don't exist. Seems pretty reasonable. And they thought that this principle is kind important because a lot of their opponents, for instance, like the Charvaka materialists who we were talking about earlier, or the Buddhists sometimes seem to suggest that the mere fact that we don't observe the self or an afterlife means that these things don't exist.
(23:59):
So mere non-observation cannot be a decisive reason for ruling out the existence of something. That's the principle that these people like to endorse.
Melissa Gismondi (24:09):
So would they have defined observable by sight or what other ways do you think?
Nilanjan Das (24:15):
Typically, in this context we have a more expansive notion of observation. People do talk about observing atoms, for example, these days in laboratories, but this is much earlier, when people did have a more restricted notion of what is observable. So in this case, it's like what is observable by our sense faculties alone without anything that assists them.
Melissa Gismondi (24:46):
Although the problem of induction is usually traced to David Hume, Nilanjan's research showcases how thinkers like Udayana were wrestling with a different version of the problem long before him.
Nilanjan Das (24:59):
So the interesting thing is that maybe to make the connection with Hume a bit more explicit, the principle that I just mentioned, the principle which says that, "Well, if something is unobservable, the fact that there is no observational evidence for it does not count as evidence for its absence or non-existence." So this idea poses a problem of inductive knowledge in this context, which is very different in some ways from Hume's problem, but at the same time quite similar enough so that we might recognise it as a problem of induction. So the thought is that, let's go back to the emeralds example.
(25:40):
Suppose I've seen lots and lots of emeralds and they all appear to be green. So I could conclude that all emeralds are green. So in doing so, we not only might form a justified belief that all emeralds are green, but also we might come to know correctly that all emeralds are green, right? So the problem essentially is that how did I come to know that all emeralds are green? Obviously by observing emeralds. But a crucial part of it seems to be that I also did not observe any emerald that is not green, and in coming to believe or know that all emeralds are green, I am ruling out the possibility that there are emeralds which are spatiotemporally distant from me, which are not green.
(26:36):
So I'm ruling out the possibility of non-green emeralds in parts of the world, which I have not observed or could not observe. So the question that the Sanskrit philosophers ask is what gives you the right to do it? Now if you say, "Well, it's because I've never observed a non-green emerald." But that's like appealing to the lack of observational evidence for something.
Melissa Gismondi (27:02):
The ignorance piece.
Nilanjan Das (27:03):
To say that, "Well, lack of observational evidence is enough to rule out the existence of this kind of spatiotemporally distant, non-green emerald." But note that because these non-green emeralds by hypothesis are located in parts of the world that I could not observe, they're unobservable for me. But surely we can't rule out the existence of unobservable entities simply by appealing to the lack of observational evidence for them, as in the case of atoms. So the principle, it seemed very reasonable, creates a problem for induction in this case. So if that principle, which seemed very reasonable is correct, then we cannot have inductive knowledge.
(27:46):
And so this is a new version, I would say, or a different version of the problem of induction from the one that Hume was concerned with. So one thing I wanted to mention is that though we are talking about a particular author who articulates this problem very clearly, Udayana in the 10th to the 11th century, the problem has a larger history. Actually, it goes back to the Charvaka materialists I started talking about.
Melissa Gismondi (27:14):
When were they?
Nilanjan Das (28:16):
This is unclear, but there is one text for instance, written in the 8th century by an author who identifies as a Charvaka called Jayarashi who states a version of this problem of induction. And the versions of the problem, we're already familiar by the 7th century at least. There's a Buddhist philosopher called Dharmakirti who explicitly formulates a problem in a certain way and then tries to give a solution to it. So I would say this problem predates Hume at least by a thousand years.
Melissa Gismondi (28:56):
It's hard to overstate Udayana's significance in terms of his influence on Indian philosophy, but you'd be hard-pressed to find Udayana taught in an intro to philosophy class here in Canada.
Nilanjan Das (29:08):
So most of these texts are not available in translation, and even when they are available in translations, these translations are done by philologists or indologists who are writing for a certain kind of audience. They're not written for philosophy students or non-specialists who want to understand what the arguments are. Even in the secondary literature, when people are writing about this argument, again, because these are not written by philosophers, they are presented in a way which is not easily accessible to philosophy students.
(29:40):
So in all those respects, I think there's a problem here where we just don't have the material to introduce philosophy students to these ideas. And so a lot of the work that needs to be done in our area is just of producing translations and good articles or book chapters or books which lay out the arguments much more clearly perspicuously so that philosophers may take them up and engage with them.
Melissa Gismondi (30:09):
You said earlier that for instance, you wanting to study Sanskrit texts in a philosophy department, that that's gotten better. What about philosophy writ large? My sense is that there's still a perception that "philosophy" comes from Europe, comes from Kant and Aristotle. When I took philosophy classes, I think the only non-white author I read was maybe Fanon. What's the state of it now, would you say?
Nilanjan Das (30:40):
So I think things have really changed in the last decade or so. People do recognise the need to engage with other traditions and not just be restricted. I think that needs to happen at two very different levels. One is departments should employ people who can teach this material obviously, but at the same time, there should be material to teach. I think we need to sort of expand efforts in both directions, like hiring people who can teach this material, the Sanskrit stuff, but also at the same time making the Sanskrit stuff available so that even non-specialists can read it.
(31:20):
For example, if I'm teaching, let's say introduction to philosophy for first years, I might include some Plato in this syllabus, but I don't have to be an expert on Plato to teach Plato, and we don't have material of this kind yet. At least not as much material as there should be, for instance, when it comes to teaching Indian philosophy.
Melissa Gismondi (31:45):
I'm curious how you think philosophy would change if Sanskrit philosophers, Sanskrit texts we're taught more in departments, and I'm thinking not just of who or what is considered philosophy, but also the ideas and themes that students taking these classes, for instance, would engage with.
Nilanjan Das (32:05):
So I think there are two things, right? As you were saying, there's a distorted conception of philosophy, that it starts with Plato and it keeps going. There's a kind of narrative about philosophy, which is an extremely Eurocentric way of thinking about the history of philosophy. So obviously including this material more generally from any tradition really outside of this, like the Chinese tradition or the Indian tradition would obviously undermine that distorted conception of the history of philosophy. That's a given.
(32:38):
However, one question which I think often comes up is that what would be the point of undermining that distorted conception of philosophy? Why is that a useful thing for philosophy itself for philosophers? I think it's because often these other traditions have ideas or arguments or theories to offer, which would enrich the discussion of the same ideas or theories or arguments in other traditions. So the thought is that suppose we are teaching the problem of induction, taking seriously what Udayana or Dharmakirti or other Indian philosophers had to say about induction can help us see certain aspects of the problem more clearly than others.
(33:27):
For example, if I'm interested in knowing how important is the uniformity of nature to the problem of induction or to the possibility of inductive knowledge. If it turns out that we can show that inductive knowledge is impossible in another way without appealing to the uniformity of nature, that just shows that maybe Hume's way of posing the problem is not the only way of posing the problem. So it helps us at least get clearer on what the problem might be or how different problems of induction are distinguished from each other. All we are doing as philosophers is trying to understand the conceptual geography around certain themes, like how different concepts fit together or how different arguments fit together.
(34:15):
What does the space of theoretical possibilities look like? So if we're bad cartographers, we'll just restrict ourselves to a certain part of the ocean and never venture outwards. But then there is this bigger picture of philosophy which encompasses all these different traditions, which allows us to get a better sense of what the conceptual terrain looks like.
Melissa Gismondi (34:48):
There's no shortage of debates these days about what is or isn't true. So many of the themes philosophy engages with, scepticism, evidence and that age-old question of how do we know what we know—they seem more important now than ever before. So I asked Nilanjan what comes to mind when he looks at how knowledge is being assessed in today's world?
Nilanjan Das (35:12):
So one thing that I find very interesting about contemporary debates is that often there are two things happening. One is that there's a kind of a distinction we can make that fits some philosophers make between epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. Where epistemic bubbles are basically spaces or communities where essentially no information from the outside gets in. So it's basically places where people come up with their views about the world without looking at all the available information. The other case is where information does get in, but it is treated with this distrust.
(35:55):
So there's an inequality of epistemic credit. The way epistemic credit is assigned to the testimony, let's say, of people within the community and the testimony of people outside of the community. And I think that distinction is really important because it means that even if we are engaging in, let's say I live in an echo chamber and I'm engaging in a debate with someone outside of my echo chamber, I might understand what the arguments are that other people are giving. I just don't trust what they're saying. So I don't trust the premises of the argument, so I'm not going to be convinced by the argument.
(36:36):
So this is where I think it's kind of interesting to contrast this with a different model of public discourse in which I think we get from a lot of deep discussions of debates in Sanskrit philosophy where it seems to me that there's already a way of counterbalancing the harmful effects of people forming echo chambers, where they keep distrusting each other by setting up certain rules of debate where people have to proceed always from the common ground. Well, for example, this is the Nyaya epistemological tradition to which Udayana, for example, belongs.
(37:15):
So one of the rules in the Nyaya epistemological tradition is that whenever you give examples to support your premises, those examples have to be public examples. They have to be examples that everyone will accept. So by setting up these rules, the aim is to narrow the stock of evidence or restrict the stock of evidence that you can appeal to in the debate so that everyone accepts that body of evidence to be evidence. And well, I'm not sure whether that actually helps us make progress, but it's an interesting solution I think to a lot of the problems that we see.
(37:54):
For example, when it comes to disinformation and misinformation, where essentially often the way people are misinformed is not because they are not looking at other information, but rather because they don't trust the information from certain sources or trust them less than this trust information from the sources that they prefer. And the thought is that well, by maybe narrowing the stock of information that we can appeal to in a certain way, we are going to restrict the moves we can make in a debate so that people don't talk past each other essentially.
Melissa Gismondi (38:29):
Interesting. I just had the image of chess knowing the rules of how to argue. So it sounds like with Udayana and the rules that they'd set out, there was already an intrinsic degree to which they're speaking a common language, even if they're disagreeing, which we don't have so much of today.
Nilanjan Das (38:52):
So I think this comes up quite a bit in the context of religious debates, for instance, when people are debating the existence of God. Where even there the aim... Even though people obviously will disagree with certain principles or premises that are being put forward in these arguments, the thought is that you cannot appeal to evidence while supporting these premises, which other party won't accept. So there should be a common stock of evidence, and the thought is that's how we can make progress in a debate not otherwise.
Melissa Gismondi (39:32):
Nilanjan Das is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. He was a JHI Faculty Research Fellow for 2023 to 2024. Humanities at Large is brought to you by the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe, share this episode and leave us a five star review. It really helps to get the word out. I'm Melissa Gismondi and I'll be back in two weeks. Thanks for listening.
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