As this Wikipedia article states, “Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called the theory of knowledge, it examines what knowledge is and what types of knowledge there are. It further investigates the sources of knowledge, like perception, inference, and testimony, to determine how knowledge is created. Another topic is the extent and limits of knowledge, confronting questions about what people can and cannot know. Other central concepts include belief, truth, justification, evidence, and reason. Epistemology is one of the main branches of philosophy besides fields like ethics, logic, and metaphysics.”
However, exploring Buddhist epistemology is more about the uniqueness of Buddhist epistemology. The uniqueness of Buddhist epistemology is that Buddha teaches two means of knowledge to understand the two realities humans face: the visible phenomenal world and the invisible mental world permeating the cosmos. The current philosophical theory of knowledge covers only one way to understand our visible phenomenal world, not the underlying mental world.
The uniqueness of Buddhism is that Buddha is the only one in history who claims that he has realized the Ultimate Reality and that mentality is the only reality in the cosmos. Furthermore, mentality has two statuses: fluctuating and quiescent. While the fluctuation mentality manifests itself as the conscious version of what quantum mechanics calls the quantum realm, the quiescent mentality represents the Ultimate Reality, the equivalent of dark energy, and it is entirely undetectable unless by an enlightened person.
So, Buddha teaches two means of knowledge, inference and direct perception, to understand these two realities. While inference refers to word-based knowledge to understand the visible phenomenal universe, direct perception is reserved for comprehending the world of mentality when practiced successfully until enlightenment.
In this post, we discuss inference with a fascinating dialogue between Dr. Menachem Fisch, an internationally prominent historian and philosopher of science, and the host of Closer to Truth, Dr. Robert L Kuhn. Their contemporary language helps us understand Buddha’s teachings from thousands of years ago.
“How do we know what we know?” is the question Dr. Robert L. Kuhn asked his guest to start the conversation.
Dr. Fisch started by stating that, according to latter-day philosophy, “we do not know by our eyes or by our ears, but by means of the words we speak.”
Instead, Dr. Fisch suggested that “we are stimulated by the world,” and while “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses, but the content imparted on those stimuli is the reading in of the mind. It’s imparted by the mind.”
Dr. Fisch continued, “How we know is by means of their conceptualization.” “Sitting in the command room of our minds with the inner-eyes and looking out, … we don’t look out the windows of our eyes; everything happens within the head,… so sitting back on that armchair in the command console, and seeing on the screen the world that we experience, all that data has already been fashioned and conceptualized by our minds in ways that we do not govern.” “This is sensing.”
“Knowing,” Dr. Fisch continued, “is to render explicit those conceptualizations. In other words, to take stock explicitly, um, that’s a horse, ah, I am talking to an interviewer, and so on and so forth.” “What we can know, not what we can feel, is the function of the language of conceptual schemes, the concepts by which we conceptualize.”
Additionally, Dr. Fisch suggested, “if you look into the dictionary, words are explained by other words. The conceptual scheme, the vocabulary at our disposal, by which we experience and by which we know, is inferentially connected.” “In other words, if this point is north of that, then that point is south of that. That is about the meaning of the words. This isn’t an empirical fact. This is about how these concepts relate to each other. The limits of what we can know, the limits of our world, is the limits of our language!”
“The intriguing thing about bringing language into epistemology is that you can only know something new by using old words. If you invent a new term, it’s just a tag, not a concept.” “Like every person in this studio, you are unique. But the only way I can account for your uniqueness is by means of a set of concepts by which you are likened to others.”
“We know by means of using a concept.” Using a concept is to liken what we see to something else. So, concepts are little metaphors, a little class names.”
Dr. Kuhn immediately recognized the immensity of Dr. Fisch’s words as he questioned, “What prevents you from cascading into skepticism where we can’t know anything? Everything is related to something else. I have no foundation between what I believe and what the world really is. So, how do I know anything?”
In response, Dr. Fisch rhetorically asked Dr. Kuhn, “Define know.” However, he answered his own question as he continued, “What you are saying now is that we should be skeptical about knowing for sure, about how things stand in themselves, not how things are experienced by us.”
“How things are experienced by us,” Dr. Fisch expounded, “is already language informed, or concept informed.” “We know pretty much about the self we experience, the world we experience, the world we find ourselves living in.” “We got it right. We got it right according to our standards, no other standards.”
“Do we know things stand in themselves?”
“God knows,” was the reply.
In Dr. Fisch’s opinion, with seemingly only inferentially connected vocabulary at our disposal, humans are cursed only to know “how things are experienced by us,” not “how things stand in themselves.“
Before we discuss whether that is the case in Buddha’s opinion, let’s first try to clarify the following issues Dr. Fisch’s discussion revealed.
1) “So, how do I know anything?”
Dr. Fisch said, “If you look into the dictionary, words are explained by other words.” Furthermore, “The conceptual scheme, the vocabulary at our disposal, by which we experience and by which we know, is inferentially connected.” “If this point is north of that, then that point is south of that.” So, that is the meaning of Buddha’s inference. It refers to inferentially connected word-based knowledge.
However, in a scheme where words are inferentially connected, words do not matter because they are just representations. For example, if one calls north the south or vice versa, the direction of one’s journey does not need to change. Or, as Shakespeare said, “A rose by another name would smell as sweet.”
Therefore, Dr. Kuhn had every right to ask, “How do I know anything?” Indeed, inferentially connected word-based knowledge informs only how interchangeable names relate to each other. As Dr. Kuhn said, this kind of knowledge gives “no foundation between what I believe and what the world really is.”
Indeed, when we discuss the Kalama Suttua, we will understand that Buddha also deems word-based knowledge unsuitable in the search for the unchanging Truth.
2) Conceptualization “in ways we do not govern” Changes Reality
What Dr. Fisch called “sensing” can be listed as the following five steps.”
- “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses,”
- “the content imparted on those stimuli is the reading in of the mind,”
- “the content gets fashioned and conceptualized by our minds in ways that we do not govern,”
- “Sitting in the command room of our minds with the inner eyes and looking out,”
- “seeing on the screen the world that we experience.”
These five “sensing” steps are significant because the third step, conceptualization “in ways we do not govern,” changes reality. The original first step, “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses,” is not the same as the final result, “seeing on the screen the world that we experience.”
They are also significant because they match Buddha’s similar steps known as the Five Aggregates, aggregates being the aggregates of being. The main difference between Dr. Fisch’s and Buddha’s is that the Five Aggregates incorporate consciousness. So, in the following discussion, we will include the teaching of the Five Aggregates when consciousness has a significant role. It must be understood that, as one who relies exclusively on word-based knowledge to understand the world, even world-renowned scholars cannot be expected to understand consciousness.
So, how does “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses?” Without question, looking out in the distance at a mountain, one does not sense it because it crashes into one’s eyes. So, how does one sense it?
While Dr. Fisch did not elaborate, the Five Aggregates says what enters our eyes are the waves of consciousness corresponding to the mountain. These waves carry the “contents” that become “reading in of the mind” in the next step.
So, what are these “contents“? Again, Dr. Fisch did not elaborate further. On the other hand, Buddha calls them “experiential contents.”
“Experiential contents,” by definition, are the “contents” that can be “experienced.” “Experiential contents” that can be “experienced” are the same as Dr. Fisch’s “empirical facts” can be “felt.” To Buddha, “experiential contents” and “empirical facts” represent the raw data of nature embedded in the conscious construct of all phenomena in the universe that can be “perceived directly.”
However, as Dr. Fisch said, these contents immediately become “reading in of the mind” and get conceptualized “in ways we do not govern.”
In other words, the experiential contents of nature are distorted and become human mental constructs. Images of these mental constructs are then seen on the “screen” as the phenomena of “the world that we experience.”
While Dr. Fisch did not discuss how these images become “the world we experience” on the “screen,” nor did he mention what the “inner eyes” are, the Five Aggregates teaches that the images become “the world we experience” because of the “projections of consciousness.” Indeed, there are no “inner eyes” nor “screen.” The same consciousness that distorts the experiential contents of nature also projects the distorted images, which become the visible phenomena of the universe.
In that way, the process of human observation, which includes “reading in of the mind,” conceptualization “in ways we do not govern,” and “projections of consciousness,” change reality. The invisible waves of consciousness become the visible phenomena of “the world we experience.” We will discuss these topics in greater detail when we discuss the Five Aggregates and the Observer Effect.
In philosophy, there is a question deemed “the fundamental question of metaphysics:” The question is, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” In a future post, we will discuss how Buddha’s Five Aggregates doctrine solves this most profound question in philosophy.
3) “What We Can Know” vs. “What We Can Feel.”
In his discussion, Dr. Fisch distinguished between “What We Can Know” and “What We Can Feel.” Additionally, he also made a distinction between the “meaning of the words” and “empirical facts.”
From the Buddhist perspective, these distinctions are significant because Buddha’s inference and direct perception are similarly separated. While inference is about “what we can know” using inferentially connected word-based knowledge, direct perception is about avoiding “reading in of the mind,” conceptualization “in ways we do not govern,” and the “projections of consciousness.” By avoiding these three steps, the integrity of the experiential content is preserved. When the experiential contents of nature are not distorted, they inform what Dr. Fisch called “how things stand in themselves” in nature. Indeed, in Buddhism, knowing “how things stand in themselves” does not require any deity. Instead, “how things stand in themselves” is about nature, and any enlightened person can understand it.
We will discuss direct perception in a future post. In the next post, we will explain, with support from quantum mechanics, how the nature of the world humans live in is distorted starting from the quantum realm.
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