Abstract
Why didn’t modern science develop independently in India despite impressive achievements in linguistics, logic, and computational techniques? One aspect of this very complex socio-historical inquiry concerns the philosophical issue of which epistemological categories are prominently available in the intellectual culture of a tradition. After rejecting a number of options, the discussion focuses on the concept of knowledge advanced by Plato , which has been formulated in contemporary times as justified true belief (JTB). It seems this concept of knowledge never found prominence in Indian philosophy . A detailed examination of JTB suggests that it does not work as a psychological theory of the epistemic subject. However, the theory seems to be normatively significant in prescribing who may be ascribed knowledge in the face of large-scale scepticism. The theory may be viewed as a set of conditions that a knowledge-claim must satisfy in order to convince the sceptic of the validity of the claim. Theoretically, this concept will not be needed in a culture in which there is already settled agreement on what counts as knowledge in terms of texts that may not be questioned. It is likely that the authority of the Vedas in the Indian tradition foreclosed the possibility of inquiry that could have led to modern science.
And the smallest class is the one which naturally possesses that form of knowledge which alone of all others deserves the title of wisdom.
Plato
This is a revised version of a paper published as Mukherji (2000).
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Notes
- 1.
I am compelled to cite some obvious cases at this point because I have been told by fairly enlightened professional thinkers that, say, modern physics is just a ‘vocabulary’ of the Europeans.
- 2.
This caution is needed in view of important work by Hilary Putnam (1994) who, following Kant, has argued that normativity need not be opposed to universality.
- 3.
The concept that carries more of the sense of knowledge is possibly pramā, the state of true cognition (Mohanty 2000). Even though the concept of truth (or validity), prāmāṇya, is included in the definition of pramā, it is unclear if it applies to propositions, as in the Western tradition, or to valid states of cognition directly, say, in terms of sameness of representation.
- 4.
I think Sen’s observation is supported from a slightly different direction by considering why truth ‘governs’ beliefs in the first place, especially for first-personal doxastic deliberations (Shah 2003). I must mention that although Sen’s paper mentioned here was published in 2007, he delivered it as the S. K. Sen Memorial Lecture in Delhi in 1997. Sen died in 1999.
- 5.
It is obvious that this is just a suggestive list. The list will vary according to the varying conditions of cognizers. But it is not ruled out that humans, being humans, share vast areas of common knowledge. See the discussion on modularity in the next chapter (Chap. 9).
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Mukherji, N. (2017). Ascription of Knowledge. In: Reflections on Human Inquiry. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5364-1_8
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