The Dispeller of Disputes:Nagarjuna's Vigrahavyavartani by Westerhoff Jan

Author:Westerhoff, Jan [Westerhoff, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-03-10T03:00:00+00:00

3.2.3. The Epistemic Instruments as Self-established [40-41]

40. If the epistemic instruments are self-established, the epistemic objects will be independent of the establishment of the epistemic instruments for you, for self-establishment is not dependent on anything else.

If you think “the epistemic instruments are self-established like fire,” the establishment of the epistemic instruments will also be independent of the objects to be known. Why? Because what is self-established does not depend on anything else. Moreover, what is dependent is not self-established.

If the epistemic instruments establish their own veridicality, they do not require any other entities to do this for them; in particular, they do not need to be established by the epistemic objects.

At this point the opponent objects, “If the epistemic instruments do not depend on the objects to be known, what is the problem?”

While it is clear that an epistemic instrument such as visual perception establishes the existence of objects seen, why should the objects seen be required to establish perception? There does not seem to be any problem with attempting to establish the epistemic instruments without referring to the objects known.

To this we reply:

41. If for you the establishment of the epistemic instruments is independent of the objects to be known, then those will not be the epistemic instruments of anything.

If the establishment of the epistemic instruments is independent of the objects to be known, those epistemic instruments would not be the epistemic instruments of anything. This is the problem. Moreover, the epistemic instruments are epistemic instruments of something, therefore in this case the epistemic instruments are precisely not independent of the objects to be known.

Assume that the epistemic instruments were self-established, that is, they had some property analogous to the supposed self-illumination of fire. We can imagine all sorts of epistemic practices, some of which we usually regard as routes to knowledge (such as perception and inference) and others that we do not regard as such (tea-leaf reading, answering a question by tossing a coin). The idea is now that the respectable epistemic practices, that is, the epistemic instruments, establish their own veracity, while the more dubious methods do not do so. But without looking at the objects known, how do we know that self-establishment really is the mark of an epistemic instrument? After all, the only thing we know is that there is a very diverse collection of epistemic practices, some of which have a specific property analogous to the supposed self-illumination by fire. But how do we know that this property does not rather mark the epistemic practices that are not epistemic instruments? We can only do so by referring to the objects known. Only by finding out that vision reliably tells us whether an apple is red or green, thereby allowing us to successfully distinguish apples, but that closing our eyes and tossing a coin does not, can we determine that vision, which is supposedly self-established, is an epistemic instrument while coin-tossing is not. Once we have established that the analogue of the supposed self-illumination indeed

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