Abstract
This paper describes a certain interpretation of the Buddhists’ view of empty terms argued for by J.L. Shaw in his paper “Empty Terms: the Nyāya and the Buddhists”, and then defends a view of empty terms that in some ways bears a striking resemblance to what Shaw wants to say. The main aim in this paper to show how some of the intuitions that might have led to their view (if Shaw is right) can be given a sympathetic explanation in terms of some recent ideas in philosophical logic. At the end of the paper I suggest that, even if my account fails as an interpretation of the Buddhists’ view, it fits well with a certain ideal of radical emptiness that may have formed part of the Buddhists’ world-view, and to that extent is a view that the Buddhists may have found congenial.
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Notes
- 1.
Because my aim is not interpretation or even reconstruction of the Buddhists’ side of the debate, I don’t propose to give detailed exposition of the philosophical positions in question. I am assuming the positions are (more or less) those described by the Nyāya philosopher Udayana and the Buddhist philosophers Jñānaśrīmitra and his student Ratnakīrti (Udayana 1940; Ratnakīrti 1957); portions of these works are translated in Matilal (1970) and McDermott (1970).
- 2.
Hempel (1945) contains an exposition of this paradox.
- 3.
This, I surmise, is the point of the Buddhist’s retort “Because the use of such statements is deeply rooted in our habit (speech-behaviour)” (translation of part of the dialogue in Udayana, Ātmatattvaviveka, provided by Matilal (1970, p. 104)).
- 4.
I shall from here on restrict my discussion to singular negative existentials, ones featuring singular terms (especially singular definite descriptions).
- 5.
- 6.
One strongly suspects the latter, since if it is the ‘unreality of a thing’ (say, the son of a barren woman) that is pointed to by language then it is hard to see why we shouldn’t count one (or both) of ‘The son of a barren woman is male’ and ‘The son of a barren woman is not male’ as expressing the literal truth about this unreal thing.
- 7.
But it should be said that the Buddhists would not have acknowledged the sharp difference between descriptions and names that Shaw, for example, detects in the Nyāya doctrine of names.
- 8.
In brief, given current scepticism about descriptivist theories of names, most philosophers now think that Russell’s theory gives the wrong account of negative existentials involving names, although there is enormous controversy about how best to understand them. This is reflected in the fact that while much is being written about the former, there is virtually nothing being written about the latter. The most popular successor to descriptivism about names is Millianism, which holds that the semantic content of a name is just its referent (more or less exactly what Russell himself said about logically proper names) and thus generates the familiar problem that ‘true’ negative existentials involving names thereby must lack any semantic content.
- 9.
For an influential defence of Russell’s view, see Neale (1990).
- 10.
- 11.
Consider, for example, “…we cannot regard [‘the round square does not exist’] as denying the existence of a certain object called ‘the round square’. For if there were such an object, it would exist.” (Whitehead and Russell 1962, p. 66) and “If there were any fact of which the unicorn was a constituent, there would be a unicorn and it would not be true that it did not exist.” (Whitehead and Russell 1962, p. 248)
- 12.
- 13.
See Walton (1990) for a seminal account of the ideas of pretence and make-believe, and their importance for understanding the nature of the representational arts.
- 14.
She may also be asserting other things. Suppose, following Walton, that if a speaker utters S, pretending thereby to assert that p, then in uttering S she genuinely asserts that q (where q’s being the case makes it true in her pretence that p). If so, in uttering (2) Smith may also be asserting that Jones claims that the mountain he recently discovered is the golden mountain, for the fact that Jones makes this claim is what makes it true in Smith’s pretence that this mountain is in fact the golden mountain.
- 15.
I have said nothing here about the final part of (1), the sentence ‘The golden mountain is a mythical mountain’, or, indeed, the final sentence in (3). The apparent truth of this sentence and kindred sentences like ‘Holmes is a fictional character’ is often taken as a reason for positing special ‘non-existent’ mythological and fictional objects. I reject this reason. As I argue in Kroon (2004) predications involving expressions like ‘is a mythical mountain’ should also be treated in pretence terms. In the case of (3iii), for example, the pretence strategy I am adopting would maintain that this sentence is uttered from inside the pretence that there is a mountain recently discovered by Jones, with the speaker using the sentence to assert something about the cause of Jones’ belief that there is a mountain he recently discovered.
- 16.
Once again, I am not suggesting that the Buddhists had this radical picture in mind. I am only suggesting that if the Buddhists were indeed committed to some kind of proto-Meinongian view, there is a prima facie tension between their logical views and their doctrine of śūnyatā. I accept, of course, that the Buddhists might not have wanted to extend their doctrine to these logical reaches, and that a toleration of genuine non-entities was entirely unproblematic to them. Still, wouldn’t a view on which our apparent talk of such entities corresponds to nothing whatsoever be even more in tune with the notion of radical emptiness? Doesn’t such a strict lack of correspondence to anything whatsoever exactly match what the Buddhists (should) attribute to our apparent talk of persons, for example? On the latter topic, see Siderits (2003).
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Kroon, F. (2016). The Radical Emptiness of Empty Terms: Saving the Buddhists from the Nyāya. In: Bilimoria, P., Hemmingsen, M. (eds) Comparative Philosophy and J.L. Shaw. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17873-8_5
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