Knowledge and the 'real' world: Śrī Har {Mathematical expression}a and the Pramā {Mathematical expression}as

Abstract

The section we have examined is a persuasive and sustained demolition of the realist strategy of deriving an invariable concomitance between the existenthood of the world and the system of validation (a system accepted by both parties as being the regulator of epistemic activity). This leaves the Advaitin with an absence of invariable concomitance. This is where the Advaitin wants to be. On his view, the absence of this concomitant dependence of the system of validation on an 'existent' world points to the possibility that the cognized world is not that independent world which Nyāya takes to be the determinate reality. If that world is not philosophically proven to be so independent, then there is at least a prima facie case for the Advaitic soteriological claim that it is Brahman alone which is ultimately real, even though the commonly cognized world allows of coherent epistemic activity. It is fair to say that such a view is established by the failure of the opponent to prove invariable concomitance between inquiry, validation and an independent world. It is the inability of the opposing view to prove a metaphysical claim which itself points to the nature of the Advaitic position; the position, that is, which suspends the need to make an ontic commitment to the extrinsic world as a determinate reality. Whether the critique of the Nyāya concept of sattā takes us to the refutation of the Nyāya concept of a determinate world (and whether the Advaitic rejection of sattā is of a piece with the concept of an 'indeterminate' world) is another issue, dealt with in detail by Śrī Har {Mathematical expression}a elsewhere in his book, but beyond the purview of this paper. © 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.