Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Chapter 31: Soft Nominalism in Quine and the School of Dignaga

31 Soft Nominalism in Quine and the School of Dignāga Nominalists argue that everything that is must be particular. D. M. Armstrong contends, ‘‘Nominalists deny that there is any objective identity in things which are not identical. Realists, on the other hand, hold that the apparent situation is the real situation. There genuinely is, or can be, something identical. Besides particulars there are universals .’’1 Quine appreciates the difficulties of this position. Because the ‘‘quixotic’’ nominalist ‘‘foreswears quantification over universals, for example, classes, altogether,’’ Quine prefers ‘‘conceptualism,’’ a position that acknowledges that there are universals but holds them to be ‘‘manmade.’’ ‘‘Tactically conceptualism is . . . the strongest position . . . for the tired nominalist can lapse into conceptualism, and still allay his puritanic conscience with the reflection that he has not quite taken to eating lotus with the Platonists.’’2 In what follows I shall take Quine to be a tired nominalist. A school of Yogācāra Buddhist logicians, whose leading figures include Dignāga, Dharmakı̄rti, and Dharmottara, in works dating from A.D. 450 and after,3 offers a criticism of universals and an account of particulars that, in a number of significant respects, conforms to Quine’s description of ‘‘tired’’ nominalism. Affinities with Quine’s work are all the more striking in light of the contrasting frameworks of traditional Indian philosophies, on the one hand, and the theoretical structures of modern science and the logic of quanti- fication that are the underpinning of Quine’s analyses, on the other. 474 Although Quine, more than most recent philosophers, makes use of the link between quantification and existence to develop the implications of ontological claims while the Yogācārins lack the technical resources of predicate calculus, the relations between Buddhist nominalism and Quine’s version should not be overlooked. Instead, analysis should focus on Quine’s account of sense data, ostension, identity, and hypostasis.4 I shall consider six distinct but interrelated theses of the Yogācāra logicians that, taken together, describe what there is. If allowances are made for methodological differences, each of these ontological commitments can, when explicated, be viewed as theses to which Quine subscribes entirely or in important respects. The theses are: 1. Point-instants are what there is, and these are inscrutable. Each point-instant is unique, shared by nothing else. It is qualityless, timeless, and indivisible. Point-instants have efficacy, but cognitive acts cannot directly represent them. 2. Percepts, like concepts, are constructs. A moment of pure sensibility signals the presence of objects, but memory and productive imagination build up the percept. Percepts are artificial cuts uniting segments of an uninterrupted flow of sensations. 3. Because knowledge does not directly mirror primordial particulars , the test of valid knowledge is pragmatic rather than the correctness of representation. Knowing an object ‘‘secures’’ it so that it can become the aim of successful human action. 4. Inference, an indirect means of grasping objects, can, along with sense perception, yield genuine knowledge. Like perception, inference delivers the object so that it can become the aim of successful action. By means of inference, absent objects are indirectly cognized through marks or signs. Apprehending an object by means of its mark widens the process of generalization already present in nuce in perception because we are forced to imagine an absent object as an object-in-general. 5. Because names cannot directly mirror the point-instants, they cannot affirm anything. Instead, names signify through a system of intralinguistic exclusions that depends upon the fabric of language. Cognitive acts create the illusion that percepts and names reflect ontic entities when in fact spontaneous mental acts forge identity by suppressing several types of difference, including the difference between point-instant and brute sensation, between brute sensations Soft Nominalism in Quine and Dignāga 475 and the perception of common objects, among percepts that are repeated , and between percept and linguistic expression. The suppression of difference occurs spontaneously at the more primordial levels of cognition, but conscious choice comes into play at more complex cognitive stages. Realists fail to grasp the makeshift character of general terms, a character that results from the origin of such terms in the obliterating of differences. The failure to perceive that identity is imputed across a chain of differences encourages treating terms designating attributes as if they were referring terms. Particulars, Point-instants, and Sense...