Pointing at the Moon Buddhism, Logic, Analytic Philosophy by Jay L. Garfield & Tom J. F. Tillemans & Mario D'Amato

Author:Jay L. Garfield & Tom J. F. Tillemans & Mario D'Amato
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 0195381564
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2009-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

My own objections to Priest and Garfield's interpretations concern essentially two points: the role they attribute to totality paradoxes in Nagarjuna's thought and, especially, the type of dialetheism they attribute to him. While we may well be able to find weak contradictions/dialetheism in early texts, it seems unlikely that early authors endorse, or in any way tolerate, the robust or full-fledged form of dialetheism of which Priest and Garfield speak. Here's what being weak and being strong/robust means in this chapter: we'll speak of an endorsement of a weak contradiction as an acceptance of the truth of a statement cp at some point and an acceptance of the truth of not-cp at another; an endorsement of a strong contradiction, by contrast, means accepting the truth of a conjoined statement, cp and not-cp, i.e., cp & -cp. The move from the weak to the strong variety is not inevitable, and thus a wedge can be driven between a weaker dialetheism (in which weak contradictions are accepted) and the robust dialetheism accepting strong contradictions.

Now, there are, I think, reasons for taking Nagarjuna and the Prajnaparamita as accepting weak dialetheism. These reasons will be spelled out below. But in any case, these early authors, if they were dialetheist, could not be dismissed a priori because of looming anarchical implications or some other specter of irrationality. Formally speaking, their logic would involve a recognizable type of paraconsistency and dialetheism; indeed, arguably, it would be significantly similar to what Nicholas Rescher and Robert Brandom developed in their joint book The Logic of Inconsistency.4 In 1992, in a note liminaire to a felicitation volume for Jacques May, I had mentioned that Rescher and Brandom's (weak) inconsistency might allow us to rationally reconstruct aspects of a Madhyamika philosophy in the style of Conze and May. I later discovered that the approach was not unique to Rescher and Brandom: it was, as Koji Tanaka pointed out in his taxonomy of contemporary theories of paraconsistency, initially developed by the Polish logician Jankowski and certain other writers, including some of my Canadian compatriots. Tanaka classified these theories as "non-adjunctive" approaches to paraconsistency, i.e., they prohibit the move from individual premises, cp, -cp, to their adjunction cp & -(p.5 In other words, non-adjunctive paraconsistency enables one to affirm that cp is true and to affirm that -icp is true-a weak inconsistency-without, however, ever admitting the truth of the statement cp & -icp. This latter statement is a strong contradiction that cannot be accepted as true in the Rescher-Brandom system if dastardly consequences like explosion are to be avoided. The paraconsistency may certainly be disturbing, but it is not irrational.

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