Realisms Interlinked

Book titles that are intriguing are often uninformative, but the title of this richly rewarding book is an exception. Arindam Chakrabarti’s thesis is that realism about external objects, realism about selves (as subjects of experience), and realism about the existence of other minds (other subjectivities) are interlinked. Using resources drawn from classical Indian metaphysics and epistemology, as well as from recent work in analytic metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, he mounts a robust and sophisticated defense of widely shared commitments on all three topics. But there is another theme as well. The metaphysics of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school of Brahminical Indian philosophy is built around a system of seven categories: substance, property-particular (trope), action, universal, individuator, inherence, and absence. Other Indian systems sought to get by with far fewer categories, and much recent work in metaphysics has followed suit. This book may be seen as a sustained argument against austerity programs in the category department.The work has twenty-five chapters, each addressing the underlying themes through a somewhat different lens. Among the topics discussed are: testimony as a means of knowledge, the ontological status of absences, the meaning of ‘I’, self-knowledge, subjective idealism, global antirealism, illusionism about the mental, syntax as a guide to ontology, and several others. In each case the topic is examined using resources drawn from both classical Indian philosophy and from recent work. But since it is not possible to discuss all of these, I shall largely confine my remarks to the major recurring themes of the work.The defense of external-world realism and the defense of the self both turn on the claim that there are such things as substances—the persisting bearers of either physical or mental tropes. Resistance to this claim comes from the bundle-theoretic reduction of substances to series of bundles of co-occurring tropes. In the classical Indian context, this reductionist stance was developed by Buddhist philosophers, whose two-truths theory attempted to navigate the difficulty of explaining why the category of substance should play such a prominent role in our conceptual scheme while denying that substances exist over and above their constituent tropes. Their strategy was to relegate the substances of our commonsense ontology—our middle-size dry goods and persons—to a kind of pretend-world; the efficacy of talk of these purportedly fictional entities was to be grounded in facts about those things that are strictly real, the evanescent tropes. Chakrabarti points out that this strategy—one that was meant to portray reduction as vindication, not elimination—has a serious difficulty. It is not true in the manifest image that enduring substances are mere conceptual fictions. But neither can it be strictly speaking true (in what Buddhists call the ultimate truth) that substances are mere conceptual fictions. Their formulation of mereological nihilism leads Buddhists to deny that words for substances have meaning in the ultimate discourse. Calling such things mere fictions “only works by straddling levels of discourse, which the fictionalist’s mutually insulated ‘scientific’ and ‘folk’ levels cannot permit” (179). Chakrabarti thus concludes that the reduction cannot be coherently stated.If we must have substances, which sorts are there? Nyāya answers that we must have both objects that exist independently of their being apprehended, and selves existing distinct from the apprehensions for which the self serves as subject. Both face challenges from mereological nihilism. Macrophysical objects and selves are both composite, the first spatially and the second at least temporally. How, then, do they stand with respect to their components—are they identical or distinct? Buddhists argue that neither option can be made to work: the large table cannot be identical with the smaller table leg, and the table’s being distinct from the leg is incompatible with its occupying the same space as the leg. Chakrabarti concurs with the Nyāya response to this reductio: a composite substance bears the same relation to its components that a universal bears to its many instances (86–88). This is the relation of inherence. The universal is distinct from its instances, but it is not different parts of the one universal tableness that inhere in the dining table and the night table. Likewise, highway I-80 exists just as much in the Ohio stretch as it does in the Nevada stretch of I-80. If we wish to be realists about spatially and temporally extended objects, we should accept the category of inherence.Chakrabarti largely follows the Nyāya authors in his defense of selves through appeal to various forms of synthesis of apprehensions. To those familiar with these arguments, the parallel with Kant’s Refutation of Idealism, with its linkage of realism about objects and realism about selves, is evident. Kant held that we cannot account for diachronic synthesis of apprehensions without supposing there to be something permanent that is the subject of those apprehensions, and that since all that is given in inner sense is a flux of impressions, the notion of permanence would not be available to us in the absence of there being something permanent that is given to us in outer sense. As Chakrabarti points out (72), the notion of inner sense at work here is murky. He questions the implicit assumption that the inner sense can only cognize representations occurring through the operation of outer sense, claiming instead that the inner sense can, among other things, bring about cognition of the self. This may not seem to help. Since Nyāya subscribes to a principle of irreflexivity, there still remains the question how the self could be both subject and object of a single cognition. But here inherence once again comes to the rescue. We do, after all, say that we perceive the rug when all we see is just one corner. This can be accounted for by claiming that in perceiving the part one perceives the whole that inheres in the part. Thus one might equally well claim that when a cognition is perceived by the inner sense, the self in which that cognition inheres is also perceived. Chakrabarti thinks the realist can thereby circumvent the Kantian strategy and its transcendental idealist consequences for selves and external objects. He holds that a genuinely robust realism must reject all forms of mind-dependence, including dependence on the conceptual resources peculiar to human cognizers.Chakrabarti announces early in the book that he takes realism about other subjectivities to be linked to realism about the self, quoting Peter Strawson’s “If only mine then not even mine” (5). But the defense of this linkage is developed in a somewhat piecemeal fashion. One piece comes in his discussion of the Indian debate over the correct account of metacognition. Chakrabarti supports Nyāya’s higher-order perception (HOP) approach: it is by means of a separate operation, performed by the inner sense, that one comes to cognize the visual cognition of blue color. One defense of this account against the rival first-order approach is that it avoids the solipsism that threatens those reflexivist first-order theorists who hold that cognitions cognize themselves (199). But the HOP theorist may be forced to say that our attribution of mental states to others goes by way of an analogical inference, an approach Chakrabarti sees as problematic. Here he turns away from Nyāya and toward the Kashmiri Śaivism of Abhinavagupta and Utpaladeva, who hold that the sentience of other subjects is cognized not through an analogical inference but instead by an abduction that somehow yields just the sort of direct acquaintance one supposedly has of one’s own subjective nature (134). Chakrabarti suggests that out of these materials it may be possible to construct a transcendental argument for “the underlying unity of all sentience” (203). This would allow him to honor the thrust of the Strawson quotation, that realism about the self and realism about other subjects are linked. But it is not clear why he rejects a less metaphysically extravagant approach, that of the classical Indian higher-order thought (HOT) theorist, who gives a uniform account of self-attribution and other-attribution based on evidence that the object has been attended to. Metacognition is not a matter of ‘direct acquaintance’ on this approach, but its proponents hold (in agreement with Abhinavagupta) that stock cases of abductive inference are phenomenally more like perception than standard inferences: seeing that Caitra is not in the house, one immediately grasps that he is out.It would be remiss on a reviewer’s part not to mention some difficulties they found with the work under review. This book could have been more carefully edited. Citations are missing, there are some curious interpolations, and at one point we are introduced to the interesting notion that certain statements belong to a ‘reductive clan’. (One wonders if they have a tartan.) And while Chakrabarti is generally careful to explain any Sanskrit terms he uses, there is one chapter (chapter 16) containing enough untranslated Sanskrit as to deter all but the most resolute nonspecialist. On a deeper level, those who know the Buddhist philosophical tradition may feel that he sometimes takes Dharmakīrti to represent the entire tradition. He often seems to be portraying ‘the Buddhist’ as holding a representationalist view of perception, and Buddhist representationalism as imposing a veil of ideas between perceiving subject and external world. Most Buddhist schools are direct realist, and the second claim is at least questionable. There is also a puzzling attempt at refuting a non-Buddhist version of the reflexivist thesis that every cognition cognizes itself (163–64). The argument turns on metacognition having propositional structure, but this seems to be in considerable tension with the reflexivist thesis that cognitions are self-revealing. On such an account, when there is the cognition of a pot, there is the presentation of the pot, and there is also the presentation of the illumination whereby the pot is presented; but the latter is just the bare self-presenting of illumination, and not something having the structure illumination-R-pot. It is not clear that the refutation succeeds without the questionable assumption that meta-cognition is necessarily de dicto. But I must add that this and a few other apparent missteps in no way detract from the overall value of what has been accomplished here.Chakrabarti characterizes his enterprise as a matter of “doing philosophy in a cosmopolitan key,” giving us a preview of “a future philosophy without borders” (8). For those who remain skeptical about the value of such globalizing projects, this book is an important test case. Chakrabarti is among the very few philosophers alive today who are equally at home in the Sanskrit texts of classical Indian philosophy and recent work in the analytic tradition. In this book he has given us ample evidence of just how rewarding an enterprise of this cosmopolitan sort can be

Analytic philosophy · Argument (complex analysis) · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · Idealism · Metaphysics · Philosophy of language · Philosophy of mind · Realism · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Medicine · Philosophy