Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [52]
Modern skeptics are not arguing that we actually are dreaming, but that if we can’t even say for sure whether we are dreaming or not, then it seems silly to go around claiming to know stuff about sodas and Doritos and whether President Bush is the Greatest President. Take a second to consider this point, since even some really smart philosophers have failed to fully appreciate that Modern skeptics don’t use dream arguments to worry about reality so much as they worry about what this possibility says about our knowledge. Through arguments from ignorance, Modern skeptics claim that it’s not possible for anyone to know anything about the world of experience. Hence, the sound-bite slogan of Modern skepticism is “knowledge is impossible.”
Indian Skepticism: Concepts of Knowledge Are Incoherent
Skeptics in ancient India, such as Nagarjuna (around 200 C.E.) and Jayarasi (around 800 C.E.), didn’t try to suspend judgment like Pyrrhonists or deny that knowledge is possible like Modern skeptics. In a sense, they’re much bolder than their Western counterparts, since they try to show that the very concepts philosophers use to discuss knowledge are incoherent.101
India developed its own tradition of epistemology that differs in a few ways from Western epistemology.102 For example, epistemologists in India worried above all about the “means to knowledge” (pramana in Sanskrit). For most Indian epistemologists, identifying the correct means to knowledge is an important task both for regular life and for programs of religious liberation. The two most common means to knowledge are perception and inference. How do you know that Stephen is wearing a red tie in tonight’s episode? You see it and are thus using perception as a means to knowledge. How do you know that The Colbert Report will be on right after The Daily Show? You infer it by appealing to the reason that whenever The Daily Show is on, The Colbert Report always follows.
One of Nagarjuna’s skeptical arguments against theories about the means to knowledge runs something like this: First, he asks how we establish that there are means to knowledge in the first place. Suppose we establish the means to knowledge by appealing to the things we know. But how do we know those things without having already established a means to knowledge? We can’t assume that the means to knowledge tells us what we know, since the existence of these very means to knowledge is what was being questioned. So we can’t establish the things we know without means to knowledge and we can’t establish the means of knowledge without having established the things we know. Hence, any attempt at a theory of knowledge in these terms is circular and incoherent. In his own Meta-Free-Phor-All, Nagarjuna claims that this would be to say that the father produces the son and that the son produces the father at the same time. If you say that, the very meanings of the terms “father” and “son” break down, because each person would fit both the definition of “father” and the definition of “son.”103 Say I told you that Stephen is the father and Stephen, Jr. is the son and at the same time that Stephen, Jr. is the father and Stephen, Sr. is the son. Each one would be both father and son! Who would be the majestic American Bald Eagle and who would be the majestic American pundit?
Jayarasi belonged to a school of philosophy called Carvaka, which was notorious among Indian philosophers for being vehemently anti-religious. They denied karma and reincarnation,