Arbitrary Marks

This post wasn’t originally intended to be a two-parter, but I realized that it was getting pretty long, so I’ve split it up. In the first post, I gave a brief overview of W.V.O. Quine’s argument for indeterminacy of meaning (aimed at the larger question of whether there is a distinction between analytic/synthetic meanings). Then I noted that one problem that Quine seems to run up against is that he’s making meaning impossible–and winding up in a self-refuting position with a nasty infinite regress.

This is a similar position that the Madhyamaka were in when trying to argue for the thesis of emptiness or sunyata: fellow Buddhists objected that this made the Buddha’s doctrines null, since they would be empty. Further, many interlocutors accused Nagarjuna of being self-refuting, since his own words are empty (see the opening of the Vigrahavyavartani), and of being nihilistic.

In “Sunyata, Texualism and Incommensurability”, Michael Barnhart outlines the way in which Nagarjuna’s project is aligned with that of thinkers like Quine and how the concept of sunyata can rescue Quine from the same criticisms I’ve described above. Below I’ll 1) briefly revisit the idea of sunyata, 2) try to compare Quine and Nagarjuna on meaning and 3) see if Barnhart’s take on the Madhyamaka is any help with Glock’s criticisms.

And then maybe I can revisit mirror neurons!

Sunyata

This is a concept that I’ve talked about a lot here before, but I’ll give as quick a summary as I can. Sunyata is the idea that there is nothing that has “self-existence”, or “svabhava”; rather, everything that exists is mutually dependent (”pratityasamutpada”). This means that there is no transcendent realm to which we can appeal to ground meaning, like Kantian categories or Platonic Forms. Instead, any term we are using has to be understood in an entire holistic apparatus.

Of course, this is primarily discussed in terms of the existence of the self, since the Buddhist concern is to explain how there is no essentially existing eternal self (in contrast to Hindu views, in general) and yet it still makes sense to talk about a “self” attaining nirvana or taking refuge in the dharma, etc.

Sunyata and Meaning

The connection between Quine and Madhyamaka is evidently their concern with holism. Here is Quine on this topic:

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs … is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges … A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field … But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience … If this view is right, it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement.

The image here is of a network or a web of belief, the boundaries of which bump up against the world, and the internal connections are further from that bumping against. When we have some kind of “surface irritant” or experience with the world, it requires some readjustment in the network of our beliefs–but that adjustment isn’t merely in the belief brushing against the world. The entire network is impacted.

Of course, we have some choice as to where we make those adjustments. Beliefs at the interior are less likely to be adjusted (here we’re thinking of what are typically understood as “logical” truths). In a religious sense, you could think of the interior network as being the Buddhist Four Truths or Christian creedal beliefs. Any potentially discomfirming experience will have to be significant in order to shift those internally located beliefs.*

But, as Quine and the Madhyamaka point out, these beliefs don’t stand alone, but are situated in an entire network.

So, how can we say they are “true”?

Escape from Nihilism

This is the concern of the criticsms of Madhyamaka and Quine: if the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths are empty (i.e. “mutually dependent upon other concepts”), then they aren’t true! But Nagarjuna responds to his opponent by saying that they’re misinterpreting “empty”:

A wrongly perceived emptiness ruins a person of meager inteligence. It is like a snake that is wrongly grasped or knowledge that is wrongly cultivated.

The point is not that emptiness = nonexistence, but that existence itself is relational and that it cannot be expressed in substantialist terms. Put another way, there are no “joints” at which we carve nature. Quine’s point that our ontology is part of our background theory is akin to the Madhyamaka claim that there are many valid frameworks for understanding reality.

But, does this leave us in a self-refuting relativistic place? After all, if we say that there are many valid frameworks for understanding reality, we’re also saying that there is one framework to understand reality: that of multiply valid frameworks.

Back to Quine, here we have the contentious idea of conceptual schemes, which Donald Davidson criticized in his “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” First, is Quine positing a dualism between content and scheme? And, secondly, is it tenable? (I’d say “not sure” to the first–that requires more study of his tets and “doubtful” to the second). And it seems like we’re stuck in a place that means we can’t criticize others’ organizations of the world (is creationism equally valid as evolutionary theory? efforts to convert gays and the normalization of homosexuality?).

So, is Davidson’s scheme-content criticism able to be leveled at Madhyamaka? Does it entail a similar claim about translatability that Quine’s understanding of meaning does? Those are questions for a larger project than just a blog post, requiring more reading of both sets of texts.

However, at least on the surface, the Madhyamaka encourage a return to the conventional while allowing for a level of embedded transcendent truth (the absolute truth of emptiness) that is similar to Quine’s “acquiesing” to the apparent meanings of our language when faced with indeterminate translations. The claim is that even though we don’t have an absolute place to stand and make decisions about conceptual schemes, we can investigate relatedness within a scheme and we can cal into question categories like “conceptual scheme” since it seems itself to be subject to a sort of essentializing impulse. (So that’s a partial response to the first question I pose above, perhaps.)

I don’t think, though, that any of this directly goes to Barnhart’s worries about Quine’s regress, except in the parallel way that sunyata forms a transcendent precondition for meaning as does translation. The proferred solution to the problem of emptiness (that the opponents are understanding it as “non-existent” and this generates the self-contradiction) doesn’t seem to, er, translate to Quine.

At least not as I can see just yet.

Mirror Neurons

So, back to my original speculation:

“If meaning is built, evolutionarily, upon my mirror neurons firing and recognizing action, then, aren’t we starting off with more similar mental lives than disparate? In a world in which humans’ brains worked differently and we quantified objects differently–like temporal slices, perhaps, counting my pencil-today as different than pencil-yesterday and pencil-tomorrow–then those other translations would be more feasible.”

1. It seems like a Madhyamaka account of meaning might want to resist understanding meaning as purely reducible to evolutionary explanation.
2. Yet, on a naturalized epistemology, it’s the appropriate question to ask what causal connections there are between the psychology of my forming beliefs and the world around me. The question is whether (see 1) we want to talk only about mirror neurons, and not about things like justification and translation.
3. Perhaps advances in the study of mirror neurons can help, in some way, defeat skepticism, but that will depend on the way you want to talk about epistemology (2).
4. Finally, it seems like (3) can help with skepticism only if we privilege evolutionary explanation in some way as to claim that our ontology should match our evolutionary adaptation. And this is a problem for (1).

At least those are some initial thoughts…

*Some time ago, I wrote a paper investigating how views of scripture might fit into this image: would one’s hermeneutic lie at the center and the words of the scripture be at the edges? If so, that seems to point towards why there’s so much talking past one another in the religious traditions where interpretation of texts is concerned. It was a brief sketch, though, and an early paper, so I am not putting it online!

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Buddhism, Language, Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Email me at arbitrary [dot] marks [at] gmail [dot] com if you think a discussion should be re-opened.