Thursday 16 July 2015

Sishyphean Task/Pramana


It occurred to me that by taking pramana as a means of knowledge the focus is taken away from the means as an end in itself. We are shunted into wrangles about whether a particular end might not have been achieved by some other means. Is our knowledge of the denotation of ‘gavaya’ due to the testimony of the forester or an inference and so on and so forth? The logical end point of these diversions are a reduction of all pramana to perception. However if you take like/unlike as a knowledge bearing dyad which is immediate and irreducible to any other, the primitive insight is preserved. The Sisyphean task of contriving an example which isolates the single pramana that plucks the fruit is left as the sport of philosophy.

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