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Conventional Truth in the Work of Dharmakīrti University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository Philosophy ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 9-5-2013 Truth For The Rest Of Us: Conventional Truth In The orW k Of Dharmakīrti Laura Guerrero Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/phil_etds Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Guerrero, Laura. "Truth For The Rest Of Us: Conventional Truth In The orkW Of Dharmakīrti." (2013). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/phil_etds/3 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i Laura P. Guerrero Candidate Department of Philosophy Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Prof. John Taber, Chairperson Prof. Kelly Becker Prof. Jay L. Garfield Prof. Russell Goodman Prof. Richard Hayes Prof. Paul Livingston ii TRUTH FOR THE REST OF US: CONVENTIONAL TRUTH IN THE WORK OF DHARMAKĪRTI BY LAURA P. GUERRERO B.A., Philosophy, Willamette University, 2000 M.A., Philosophy, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 2005 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Philosophy The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico July, 2013 iii DEDICATION For all my teachers, first and foremost my parents. iv TRUTH FOR THE REST OF US: CONVENTIONAL TRUTH IN THE WORK OF DHARMAKĪRTI By Laura P. Guerrero B.A., Philosophy, Willamette University M.A., Philosophy, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Ph.D., Philosophy, University of New Mexico ABSTRACT It is common in Buddhist philosophical literature to differentiate between two different types of truth: ultimate truth and conventional truth. For the philosophers of the Mahāyāna tradition of Buddhism, it is difficult to give an account of conventional truth that is both consistent with their anti-realist metaphysics (their ultimate position) and also robust enough to support truth as a normative concept. This dissertation addresses this problem by offering a deflationary interpretation of truth in Mahāyāna that is supported by a pragmatic account of intentionality and meaning. This account of meaning is developed from the work of the 7th Century Buddhist epistemologist Dharmakīrti. A careful reading of the Sanskrit source texts reveals that Dharmakīrti was alive to the problems of truth and objectivity in his tradition and sought to address them in his work. Dharmakīrti’s work can be read as offering a Carnapian-type solution to the problem of truth and meaning by way of an account of conventional knowledge that is grounded in what he calls arthakriyā – goal-driven human activity. Such an account is consistent with Mahāyāna anti-realist metaphysics, while at the same time providing an account robust enough to retain a sense of objectivity and to preserve a normative role for truth. v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………..1 Outline of Chapters ...............................................................................4 Dharmakīrti ...........................................................................................8 CHAPTER 2: TWO TRUTHS ………………………………………………………..13 Two Truths in Early Buddhism ............................................................14 The Development of Abhidharma.........................................................21 Two Truths in Abhidharma ..................................................................26 Two Truths in Mahāyāna .....................................................................36 CHAPTER 3: CONVENTIONAL TRUTH IN MADHYAMAKA ………...41 Mahāyāna Anti-realism .......................................................................42 Two Truths and Fictionalism ...............................................................50 Carnapian Approach to Conventional Truth .......................................60 Conventional Truth as Deflationary Truth...........................................66 CHAPTER 4: DHARMAKĪRTI AS MAHĀYĀNA …………………………...77 Dharmakīrti as a Yogācārin .................................................................78 Dharmakīrti as Sautrāntika .................................................................91 Problems with the Sautrāntika Interpretation of Dharmakīrti..............103 CHAPTER 5: DHARMAKĪRTI’S ACCOUNT OF MEANING.....................109 The Role of a Framework ...................................................................110 Explaining the Thing-language ..........................................................117 Apoha .................................................................................................123 Pragmatic Context, Use, and the Framework of Things ......................138 vi In Summary .......................................................................................145 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION …………………………………………………......148 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………....152 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This essay is concerned with truth. Specifically it is concerned with what Buddhists call conventional truth (saṃvṛtisatya), which is truth as it is ascribed to ordinary propositions asserted and believed in the course of our everyday lives. In the Buddhist tradition, it is common to distinguish this kind of truth from what is called the ultimate truth (paramārthasatya). Ultimate truth pertains to claims that reflect the actual nature of reality, or in other terms, that describe what is ultimately real. While the understanding of what is ultimately real changes throughout the course of the historical development of Buddhism, there remains in every tradition the idea that the actual nature of reality, the way it ultimately is, is not reflected in our ordinary discourse or in the way we commonly, i.e., conventionally, conceive of it.1 Despite this, however, we are told that we can still ascribe a qualified sense of truth, “conventional truth,” to such discourse insofar as that discourse plays an important practical and/or soteriological role in our lives. Drawing a distinction between ultimate and conventional truth results in the problem of explaining the sense in which conventional truths are true. The two main general traditions in Buddhism, the Abhidharma and the Mahāyāna, have different conceptual resources at their disposal with which to address this problem. As a 1 On some interpretations of Madhyamaka, the conventional truth might be taken to reflect the way that reality is by nature, but only insofar as that tradition maintains that reality has no ultimate nature; since reality has no ultimate nature, then ordinary truth claims can’t be said to get that nature wrong. Furthermore, so long as such claims are recognized to be just conventional, i.e., not true in virtue of the way reality ultimately is, then they do get reality right. This might be a way of construing the Madhyamaka claim that the ultimate truth is the conventional truth. 2 result, the kind of answers they each can give are very different. The Abhidharma tradition of Buddhism can give a reductive account that explains conventional truths in terms of their indirect reference to entities that are more fundamental and thus ultimately real. The Mahāyāna tradition, on the other hand, cannot employ such a strategy because Mahāyānists deny that there is any ontologically basic level to which conventional entities could be reduced. Therefore, the Mahāyānists have to give a different kind of account of truth at the conventional level than the account given by the Ābhidharmikas. The concern that is the focus of this project is that of identifying an account of conventional truth that is both consistent with Mahāyāna ontological commitments and that is yet robust enough to support truth as a normative concept. In other words, I seek here to provide an account of conventional truth for Mahāyāna Buddhism that can explain the sense in which such truth is true. The account I present here develops the suggestion made by Priest, Siderits, and Tillemans (2011) that the sense in which conventional truth is true for Madhyamaka is a deflationary sense. Expanding this suggestion to apply to all of Mahāyāna Buddhism, not just Madhyamaka, I argue that the answer that Priest, Siderits, and Tillemans offer to the question of conventional truth is a plausible one when it is appropriately supplemented with an account of meaning that is consistent with Mahāyāna anti-realist commitments. Deflationary accounts of truth, while not uncontroversial, have been rigorously defended by various philosophers as providing a minimal yet robust account of truth that preserves a sense of objectivity and can support the norms associated with truth. Presuming that such an account is 3 defensible, it satisfies one of the criterion for an adequate account of truth for Mahāyāna: a deflationary account is robust enough to support truth as a normative concept, as Priest, Siderits, and Tillemans claim. A deflationary account of truth also appears, at least on the surface, to satisfy the other criterion of an adequate account of truth for Mahāyāna, namely that of being consistent with Mahāyāna ontological commitments. It is consistent with these commitments because, as Priest, Siderits, and Tillemans point out, it is ontologically neutral; it does not presuppose any particular metaphysics. However, as Paul Horwich, a defender of a version of the deflationary
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