Mind going out in Advaitic Epistemology

 The vritti is an interesting element of the advaitin theory of perception which they share with the Nyaya school.  If there is direct perception of the object, as against an indirect inferential representation akin to the British Empiricists, does that mean that the mind has to go out to as it were envelop the object. I feel that enveloping metaphor is a leading one as though there were first a sight of the object and then the enveloping could proceed.

A more psychologically based view is that our sensational attention is always on in a muted way.  It is a sort of global awareness.  Who has not had the experience of in a crowded room, everyone talking volubly,  one’s name jumping out of the rhubarb?  In some sense the mind had ‘gone out’ already.  Another example would be the startle we feel when we have withdrawn ambient attention through concentration or meditation and are interrupted by someone.  

Sensation in the form of basic awareness is the global sensitivity to your environment.  It’s like a bare radar screen and then a blip for an object that we should pay attention to.  Vedanta Paribhasa talks about a subtle stream of mind but what is that but another name for attention.  Is not this attention a pale shadow of chaitanaya or Pure Consciousness?

Von Hugel and accepting the 'givenness' of things in 'The Reality of God' (Gifford Lectures)

 Amongst the apparent enigmas of life, amongst the seemingly most radical and abiding of interior antinomies and conflicts experienced by the human race and by individuals, there is one which everything tends to make us feel and see with an ever-increasing keenness and clearness. More and more we want a strong and interior, a lasting yet voluntary bond of union between our own successive states of mind, and between what is abiding in ourselves and what is permanent within our fellow-men; and more and more we seem to see that mere Reasoning, Logic, Abstraction,—all that appears as the necessary instrument and expression of the Universal and Abiding,—does not move or win the will, either in ourselves or in others; and that what does thus move and win it, is Instinct, Intuition, Feeling, the Concrete and Contingent, all that seems to be of its very nature individual and evanescent. Reasoning appears but capable, at best, of co-ordinating, unifying, explaining the material furnished to it by experience of all kinds; at worst, of explaining it away; at best, of stimulating the purveyance of a fresh supply of such experience; at worst, of stopping such purveyance as much as may be. And yet the Reasoning would appear to be the transferable part in the process, but not to move; and the experience alone to have the moving power, but not to be transmissible.

(from ‘The Mystical Element of Religion by Von Hugel 1908)

 Yes there is that and it is a noble inquiry but it contains within it the danger of excessive inwardness that leads to metaphysical idealism and a dwelling on the flux of motivation with its tendency to create moral paralysis.  

Adverting to Aquinas, Von Hugel remarks:

Sensible things” (the realities falling under the cognizance of our senses) “from which human reason derives the origin of its knowledge hold within themselves a certain vestige of the imitation of God” (of similitude to Him); and, further on, he speaks of “the true similitude to God that man can collect from within His works,’’ similitudes which are subjectively there. (From von Hugel’s Gifford Lectures on ‘The Reality of God)

Here in his Gifford lectures on the ‘Reality of God’ never given because of his death Von Hugel is reverting to a metaphysical Realism. He further adds to his nod to Aquinas:

True these genuine likenesses to God, present in God’s works because they are His works, do not take us a long way, leave us with but fragments of what we are very sure is a fuller and full truth, and hence he warns us against “the presumption of comprehension or of demonstration”.

A syncretic heretic like myself can easily discern the analogue to the theory of ‘perceptuality’ which is central to Advaitic doctrine as delivered by Dharmaraja Adhvarindra in the 14th.Century. A similar difficulty of demonstration occurs because it is a truth that we realize but cannot know because it is knowing itself. You cannot ‘get round’ i.e. comprehend, that. It is just given.  

Accepting the ‘givenness’ is a life’s work. More anon.

Illusionism and Acosmism in Advaita Vedanta

 

The descent into acosmism and illusionism that Advaita Vedanta is often accused of may be due to the simple failure to distinguish between the metaphysical and the physical.  A metaphysical realisation of an intense reality so powerful that it eliminates the salience of the everyday conventional reality does not thereby cause it to disappear.  Maybe this is why the Sage of Kanchi (Shankaracarya Jagath Guru) wore such powerful spectacles.  No, the physical reality does not go away.  The sages die, sometimes in pain even if they, as the poster declared, ‘Remain Calm and Carry On’.

Would it not have been better to hold to the deepening of reality in the progress of the adhiropa/apavada dialectic?  This metaphysical realisation comes as the result of the transcendental hypothesis that proposes how things must fundamentally be for things to appear as they do.  The appearance in question is the object of perception.  Our simple belief, not a naive one, that the object is as it appears presents a puzzle.  Why should we think this when on analysis we must admit that all we are aware of is a presentation to the mind.  Here the specter of idealism looms which gibbering in the shade of Kant asserts that we do not know the ‘thing in itself’.  Advaita Vedanta instead holds to the simple ‘it appears as it is’ by virtue of non-material, non-numerical identity.  There is no need here to rehearse the mechanism of vritti and upadhi /mental modification and limiting adjunct which is masterfully dealt with in the classic ‘Vedanta Paribhasa ' of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra.

Besides why would the cognitions i.e. the awareness of the objects of perceptions, disappear when:

Being the witness of all cognitions, and by nature nothing but the power of consciousness, the Self is indicated by the cognitions themselves, in the midst of cognitions, as non-different from them.There is no other door to Its awareness. (my italics) Kena Up.II.4

How then can the cognitions disappear?  Yes we realise them for what they are but they remain as the door.

David Bentley Hart and Jacques Maritain on Natural and Supernatural

 The Chiasmus: The Created Supernatural and the Natural Divine (essay from 'You are Gods' by David Bentley Hart.

D.B.H. begins by finding in the natural order what might be considered to be propaduetic to the divine.  In the Platonic and Aristotelian onto-epistemology there is a surpassing of the apparent division between subject and object.  It is in this that he comes close to the non-duality of Advaita Vedanta which he admits as an influence which guides him past the Natural/Supernatural dyad beloved by the Thomist manualists that he impugns with all the scintillating nay coruscating invective that he commands.  All good fun until someone loses an eye.

Jacques Maritain in his ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ :

“To admit in any degree whatsoever, even in simplest inchoative form, a genuine experience of the depths of God's being on the natural level would necessarily mean either to confuse our natural intellectuality (specified by being in general) with our intellectuality as it flows from grace and is specified by the Divine Essence itself; or to confuse the presence of God's immensity (whereby God is present in all things in virtue of his created efficiency) with His holy indwelling (whereby He is present in a special way, as object, in souls that are in the state of grace); or, again, to muddle up in the same hybrid concept, the wisdom of the natural order (metaphysical wisdom), and the infused gift of wisdom; or, finally, to attribute to the natural love of God what belongs exclusively to supernatural charity.”

As I mentioned Hart finds an entry point into complete realisation of the divine through experience.  ‘There is no other door to that awareness’ (Sankara)

In WWF terms regard me as the midget compadre that runs into the ring and kicks the referee on the shin.

Hart begins as Aristotle does with the sense of wonder. Out of that comes inquiry.  I may as well admit that he sends me to the dictionary betimes.  What’s chiasmus?  The general drift seems to be the repetition of the general in the particular or something.  Anyways he begins with an advaitic note by a laying out of the aporetic:

“We are accustomed, here in modernity’s evening twilight, to conceive of our knowledge of the world principally as a regime of representation, according to which sensory intuitions are transformed into symbolic images by some kind of neurological and perceptual metabolism, and then subjected to whatever formal conceptual determinations our transcendental apperception and apparatus of perception might permit....

Knowledge, then, consists in no more than a kind of cognitive allegory of and logical deduction about Being, because Being in itself possesses an occult adversity or resistance to being known....

The more rational assumption, however, is that so implausible a liaison between absolutely incommensurable spheres of reality is impossible, and that in fact mind and world must belong to one another from the first, as flowing from and continuously participating in a single source that is at once ontological and gnoseological, and in which the ontological and the gnoseological are one and the same.”

Here Hart is moving towards an epistemology that is like that of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra’s ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’.  He calls it perceptuality/perceptability.  What we know is the object itself as it is by virtue of the mental modification/vritti or in Thomist terms the ‘conversio ad phantasmata’(?).

“Only in the transcendence of form over the formed—whether the latter be a material substrate or the intentionality of the mind—can there be a place of true indistinction between the being of an object and the knowledge of that object. Only in form—only in the informing cause of both an object’s finite existence and the act of understanding that takes that object in— can the secret and most primordial impulse of all philosophy realize its end.”

Maritain denies the knowledge of God via connaturality to those wholly dependent on the natural order.  Though that experience by mystics of Islam and Vedanta may be sublime it suffers from the  disability of being stuck in the natural domain. 

“There are Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, and other schools of mystics. But the mystical experience to which they lay claim does not proceed from theological faith. There must, therefore, be a natural mystical experience.”

Hart counters the two tier view on which this judgment is based.  The first sentences of this citation is an objection:

“Surely the temporal is, from the perspective of the finite, contingent. But, from the perspective of the eternal life of God, God’s manifestation of himself to himself is never without his manifestation in creation, and so creation is eternally present within the eternal act whereby God is God.”

Where Hart causes the complaint ‘but this is pantheism’ arises from utterances like this:

“ Our being in God and God’s being in us are both also and more originally God’s being as God”

“We are, from the moment when we are called from nonbeing, spirit becoming Spirit; God is, from everlasting, Spirit disclosing himself in the creation of spiritual beings and the continuous divinization of every spirit that he has breathed forth in breathing himself.”

Pantheism is an all-purpose dismissal which is never analysed.  Is it the atheistic pantheism of Hegel or Spinoza or something else maybe a doctrine that the world is divine.  To follow that through logically it would mean the Cosmos was uncreated which is very like the ‘ajativada’ of Gaudapada (unborn).  Hart uses a Trinitarian perspective, whereby the Cosmos is an emanation from the boundless creativity of the Father.  There is nothing necessary about creation but the connection is through the unity of being.

“We are, from the moment when we are called from nonbeing, spirit becoming Spirit; God is, from everlasting, Spirit disclosing himself in the creation of spiritual beings and the continuous divinization of every spirit that he has breathed forth in breathing himself.”

Hart’s essay is of course ‘per speculum in aenigmate’.  The ambhibological words which swim in two oceans are used to advance his speculations.  Deep meditations here and natation outside the flags.

Note on Non-Apprehension of Existence in Nyaya Manjari

A pramana has been defined as a means of valid knowledge. One of the means of valid knowledge that has been accepted by advaita vedanta and rejected by the Nyaya school is that of anupalabadhi. The standard example is – 'There is no jar on the floor'. This is interpreted as non-apprehension of existence by Swami Madhavananda in Vedanta Paribhasa(trans) and as non-perception by Janaki Vallabha Bhattacharyya in Nyaya Manjari(trans). This divergence is the crux of their disagreement. I find the justification of the pramana in V.P. to be sound but incomplete and its rejection in N.M. not convincing but nevertheless raising some interesting points.

The Nyaya position has an intuitive immediacy. Not seeing the jar on the floor is a matter of simple perception. The visual input does not include a jar. Agreed says the Vedantin you are seeing something viz.the floor and at that locus you do not see a jar. This non-apprehension is an instrument of knowledge or a means of knowledge. Here I venture my own interpretation of this point. Clearly a non-apprehension cannot be a means of knowledge of itself or an otiose, pointless self-referential observation. What then is its informational content? Must it not be related to a context of expectation? You were told that there was a jar on the floor in the kitchen. On going there you don't see one and make the canonical report.

Then there was the case of the dog that did not bark in the night-time.

- Look at the ceiling' I said to my wife, what do you not see?
- Puzzled, she replied, what am I looking for?
- Water.
- You mean you fixed the leak in the shower stall upstairs.

(domestic fiction)

Jayanta Bhatta mentions in Nyaya Manjari similar real situations with a context of non-apprehension.

Happiness or sorrow arises in the absence of a foe or of a friend. A man places his feet on the way seeing the absence of a thorn on it. A man is earnest to search for the material of a jar if he finds that no jar has come into being. A man refrains from taking medicine when he realises that he is free from disease. No thoughtful man can deny objective existence to negation having noticed that it actually exists and many worldly transactions are based on it.

(pg.124/160 adobe pdf)

Is Shankara an Idealist?

You will occasionally read that Shankaracarya was an Idealist, a position which is clearly wrong when you consider his rejection of Vijnanavada (Buddhist Subjective Idealism) in B.S.B. II.ii.28. A pithy summation would be – we do not perceive our perceptions, we perceive/cognize a pillar, a wall or whatever as objects of perception. That’s straightforward but it might be interesting to consider why such a view might take root on the Coleridgean principle that until I understand a person’s ignorance I am ignorant of his understanding.

All philosophical systems require translation even those in our native language. How much more then can the usage of such terms as mind, matter, image etc offered as translations derail our understanding as we fit them into our native epistemology.

For the swerve towards idealism I blame the concept of vritti or mental modification.

Now, as the water of a tank, issuing through a hole, enters in the form of a channel a number of fields, and just like them assumes a rectangular or any other shape, so also the luminous mind, issuing through the eye etc., goes to the space occupied by objects such as a jar, and is modified into the form of a jar or any other object. That very modification is called a state (vritti)

(from Vedanta-Paribhasa by Dharmaraja Adhvarindra writing on perception)

You can see that a focus on the mental capture of the object might lead one to consider it as the point of departure to an inference of the object. Our knowledge of the object can become to be seen as mediated by the vritti. Vedanta-Paribhasa corrects us:

…, in the case of the perception of a jar as, “This jar,” the mental state in the form of the jar being in contact with the jar, the Consciousness limited by that mental state is not different from the Consciousness limited by the jar, and hence the knowledge of the jar there is a perception so far as the jar is concerned.

Pure Consciousness as limited by the object and pure consciousness as limited by the mind of the subject is one and the same. Therefore the object can be ‘in’ the subject as it really is.

Illusion and Confusion and the Snake/Rope example

When discussing in Indian philosophy the snake/rope confusion we need to strictly distinguish it from an illusion. An illusion stays an illusion even when you know that it is one. The Muller-Lyer lines still continue to look unequal. Adalbert Ames’s illusions are uncannily persistent.ames room
The rope is no longer seen as a snake when we discover our mistake and that is an important epistemological point in Indian philosophy. In the Nyaya inflected account of the advaitin Dharmaraja Adhvarindra our default position re perception is to accept it as veridical until shown not to be on further acquaintance.

He writes in the section The validity of Knowledge is Intrinsic and Self-Evident of the chapter on Non-Apprehension:

The validity of knowledge generated by the above -mentioned means of knowledge originates by itself and is self-evident. To explain: Valid knowledge is that knowledge regarding something possessing a particular attribute, which has that attribute as its feature which is conducive to successful effort, and which includes recollection as well as fresh experience.

The term ‘effort’ refers to the factor of confirmation. The silver we pick up is precious and not a mere piece of nacre. Unsuccessful effort is to discover on closer examination that we were suffering from temporary confusion. Clearly this is different from illusion.

Perception in Advaita Vedanta

Now as the water of a tank, issuing through a hole, enters in the form of a channel a number of fields, and just like them assumes a rectangular or any other shape, so also the luminous mind, issuing through the eye etc., goes to the space occupied by objects such as a jar, and is modified into the form of a jar or any other object. That very modification is called a state (vritti). But in the case of inference etc., the mind does not go to the space occupied by fire etc., for the latter are not in contacty with the eye etc. Thus in cases of perception such as, “This jar,” the jar etc. and the mental state in the form of these combine in the same space outside the body, and hence the Consciousness limited by both is one and the same, for the mental state and the objects such as a jar, although (usually) they are dividing factors, do not (here) produce any difference, since they occupy the same space. For this very reason the ether limited by a jar and that which is within a monastery is not different from the ether limited byh the monastery. Similarly, in the case of the perception of a jar as, “This jar,” the mental state in the form of the jar being in contact with the jar, the Consciousness limited by that mental state is not different from the Consciousness limited by the jar, and hence the knowledge of the jar there is a perception so far as the jar is concerned. Again, since the Consciousness limited by happiness etc. and the Consciousness limited by the mental state relating to them are invariably limited by the two limiting adjuncts that occupy the same space, the knowledge, “I am happy,” is invariably a perception.

(from Vedanta Paribhasa on Perception)

Professor Bina Gupta (in The Disinterested Witness pg.103ff.) is dubious about the claim of V.P. that the luminous mind goes out to take the shape of the object. The shape of the object is what is termed the vritti or mental modification in the usual translation. What Gupta offers is a separation of these two assertions (a) the going out (b) the vritti. Retaining the vritti as an internal event is a turn towards psychologism and representationalism. The well known vulnerability to the private language argument proposed by Wittgenstein is a salient feature of these views. The strength of the traditional advaitin view is in the radical externality of the object of perception and the securing of our knowledge of it as it really is. The basis of this perceptuality lies in the common substratum of pure consciousness of both the mind and the object.

Gupta claims that this going out is a primitive physiological theory also held by the Greeks and is suggested by the problem :

How is it that the object is there at a distance, yet I am able to see it from here. What bridges this distance? This is an important issue in the psychology of perception. Thus the Advaitins had a nice, though scientifically incorrect, answer - the mind itself goes out there, the form I perceive is not just in my brain but is also out there in the thing perceived.

Here we are at the confused borderland of Metaphysics and Psychology. In the Advaitin metaphysics subject and object meet in the extra-personal field of Pure Consciousness and the knowledge precipitate is superimposed on the mind of the individual perceiver.

Richard King on Asparsa Yoga in Gaudapada's Karikas (Early Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism)

Writing on Asparsa Yoga: the Gaudapadian Phenomenology of Perception:

Perception is base upon the possibility of contact (sparsa) between a perceiver and a perceived object. An attack upon this notion then is fundamental to an attack upon all “realist” theories of perception. The Nyaya Sutra, for instance, defines perception (pratyaksa) as “the determinate, unnamed, and unerring knowledge which arises from the contact of a sense organ with its object.” This is an inherently dualistic understanding of experience and as such is clearly unacceptable to the non-dualistic authors of the Gaudapadiya Karikas. An attack upon the notion of “contact” is fundamental to a thorough-going non-dual theory of perception. In fact, it is the GK’s position that:

“Consciousness does not make contact with an object, not even with the appearance of an object. In fact, the object is unreal, and the appearance of the object is non different. (GK IV.26)

(pg.154 Early Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism by Richard King)

There is a dense tangle of non-dual epistemology here. What we are immediately aware of is the mental modification (vritti) ‘caused’ by the object. In that sense we are not in contact with the object. But we are also aware of the object as it is because the same reality is fundamental to the vritti and the object. The object is a form of limitation of Consciousness (an upadhi) and it is this which allows it to be superimposed on the consciousness of the perceiver. The ‘unreality’ of the object, for Gaudapada, is due to the fact that it can be sublated. It is not changeless. Objects in the dream world on waking and illusory objects in the waking state are sublated because they are ultimately only true or real as consciousness. In fact the fundamental reality is Pure Consciousness, a boundless (anantam) unity of being in which there is no separation and therefore no contact (sparsha).

It is non-duality which makes perception possible, what Vedanta Paribhasa calls perceptuality. Non-duality makes duality and veridical perception possible to put it aporetically. In disagreeing with King on this point I believe that I am tracing Gaudapada’s core insight which was explicated by Sankara particularly in the preamble to his commentary on the Brahma Sutras.

Indian Intro. to the Philosophy of Perception

There may be many who wish to find out more about Indian Philosophy but are put off by the Sanskrit jargon which surrounds it, pretty but prickly like a Berberis hedge. It keeps common cattle off of course. A good introduction to the problem of perceptual error, illusion, confusion and delusion is an essay in a collection that is available on Internet Archive, Contemporary Indian Philosophy by Various Authors
Contemporary Indian Philosophy
(note: the epub version is clean) pub. 1950 in a revised and extended edition.

The Problem of Truth by M. Hiriyanna is an exposition along classical Vedanta lines which avoids having to learn the rudiments of philosophy bazaar Sanskrit. The philologically minded may deplore this but philosophy isn’t poetry, it’s not lost in translation. In any case that classic text Vedanta Paribhasa by Dharmaraja Adhvarindra who flourished in the 17th.century seems to be the guiding light. It is also available on internet archive and a more modern version with glossary translated by Swami Madhavananda is (pdf)
Vedanta Paribhasa

Take a break from malign demons.

Consider the Platypus ye scryers by Upamana

The ghost of the forest dweller haunts the simple fable of the Nyaya version of upamana. He it is who gives a name to the cow-like creature you might come across in the forest. The discovery of the denotation of the name ‘gavaya’ is what upamana is about. A contrary view is that denotation of this kind is achieved by the use of upamana but is not its sole fruit. Dharmaraja Adhvarindra of the advaitic vedanta school manages to send off our intrepid explorer without mentioning the ‘forester’. However the name ‘gavaya’ is given which seems to suggest denotation as an end point. If one omitted to mention the name and simply stuck with the core knowledge of ‘like and unlike the domestic cow’ that would be a means of knowledge. As the logical operation of the simple binary, like/unlike, it would tie in with the likewise simple switch of background/foreground of the arthapatti pramana. They both have a simple immediacy.

Another concern is the supposed use of memory when you spot the gavaya. Your memory of the cow may be operative in your judgement of likeness/unlikeness and memory is not regarded as a reliable means of knowledge. The normal counter is that likeness or unlikeness in the gavaya is a contemporary experience and therefore not a memory. I sense here a frail subtlety which is in any case not needed as having a concept does not involve the use of memory once that concept is acquired. You have the capacity to use the concept permanently present to you.

In short the restricted diet of examples of upamana may be due to seeing denotation as its exclusive fruit. Consider the duck-billed platypus:

The platypus is among nature's most unlikely animals. In fact, the first scientists to examine a specimen believed they were the victims of a hoax. The animal is best described as a hodgepodge of more familiar species: the duck (bill and webbed feet), beaver (tail), and otter (body and fur). Males are also venomous. They have sharp stingers on the heels of their rear feet and can use them to deliver a strong toxic blow to any foe.

(from National Geographic: platypus

Utter unlikeness to anything ever seen before may be a means to knowledge in the sense that it mediates an expansion of knowledge.

Adhyasa/Superimposition as the key to Advaitic Critical Realism

“But availability for empirical experience depends on superimposition” (pg.419 numbered section 142: The Method of Vedanta by Sri S.S.S.)

Even though the Swami is talking about mutual superimposition of the Self and the non-self I think that a tangential truth is expressed about what Vedanta Paribhasa calls perceptuality. In other words, superimposition is the fact whereby the stone out there as an object comes in some sense to be in me, the subject.

Why do we not take the experience in here as a bounded subjective domain in the manner of Idealists (both subjective and objective) and Representationalists/Scientific Realists? Because for Vedantins the Vedas have an intrinsic ‘aboutness’. The language that they are expressed in is eternal, capturing, for all time, and in every eon, universals (vedic words). The action of the enjoined sacrifices is real and effective.

Starting from that foundation a metaphysics is promulgated which can sustain the non-numerical identity of object and mental modification (vritti). In his own way Aristotle squared that circle also.

What about illusion? Does that not break the upadhi link? It was a witty metaphysics that used as a founding analogy the fact of error. It is still the case though that our default assumption is of perception as veridical. Further experience may prove us wrong and we can accept this. We may even test our experience in an experimental fashion: Come let me clutch thee/I have thee not and yet I see thee still. Our realism is critical (krites/judge).

Arthatpatti// Language goes on holiday

Elisa Freschi was discussing the pramana (means of valid knowledge) arthapatti
arthapatti
It has been variously translated as ‘postulation’ and ‘presumption’. One commentor ‘Bama’ preferred ‘presumption’. Elisa offered a palette of terms including ‘cogent evidence’. This led me to thinking - maybe arthapatti is too simple for words.

My first bit of philosophical semaphore was:

We know how arthapatti works. It’s a bit like a switch where there is disjunction between the two values, on/off, true/false, yes/no. Plump Devadatta does not eat during the daylight hours therefore he must be eating at night. If one state is known i.e. alive and not at home then the other state is immediately know i.e. outside the home somewhere. Postulation does not apply. Postulation may be shown to be correct or it may be impossible to show whether or not it is. Think of Hig’s Boson and Kant’s Transcendental Postulate. We are attempting to reach towards a picture of how things must fundamentally be for things to appear as they do. Arthapatti is not tentative in any sense.

I can see where ‘assumption’ or ‘presumption’ may not be a perfect fit for what arthapatti does. There is no ‘before’ for arthapatti, there is no ‘after’ for arthapatti. Implication doesn’t fit. Knowing that plump Devadatta is fasting during the day is knowing that he eats at night. Implications have to be worked out so this is not one. Arthapatti has a bi-polar nature. It is basic and irreducible.

to which I added as an afterthought:

I wrote the following paragraph before I read your response. There is a general difficulty in the explanation of basic powers. Ostensive definition has the problem of knowing what it is you are pointing at. (I admit to being an unreconstricted Wittgensteinian)

If I might add. Even if the Sanskrit has the sense of apatti – artha then it too is explaining the simple in terms of the more complex and that cannot be a good explanation. Here as Wittgenstein wrote – ‘my spade turns’. If the complex has the simple embedded in it then circularity ensues. Simply by having a human mind you get ‘switches’ in the ‘kit’.

The ‘ostensive definition’ entry in the index to Philosophical Investigations is worth looking at. Here the well known ‘logos’ occurs (38)

For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.

Language has stopped doing what it normally does when it tries to express something that is too simple for language. Switch then may express the cybernetic aspect of arthapatti, or what in Advaita is called the inert nature of mind, its mechanical quality.

Connected with this cybernetic notion in my understanding of it is the counterpositive pratiyoga concept. Broadly speaking the illusory is founded on there being an actual reality. It works like figure and ground and it is again a mechanical thing. The counterpositiveness.......abiding in the illusory silver, is characterised by conventional reality(from Vedanta Paribhasa on Perception)

You haven’t heard the last of this.

The Counterpositive shaped Hole

The odd title of this post will become clear I hope in a moment. The first thing to do when trying to come to grips with a concept is to find out the where and why of it. The notion of the counterpositive comes up in relation to perception (c.f. Vedanta Paribhasa on Perception) particularly in relation to erroneous perception i.e. confusion. We take something to be that which it is not. Now the problem arises - what is the ontological status of our confused reality. The mother of pearl is taken to be silver (precious metal). Must we then admit that for the time that we were under that illusion we were experiencing silver and on being disabused are only entitled to say 'I am not seeing silver now’.

The advaitin in response to this simply states that what is denied is not the existence of illusory silver i.e. the existence of a non-existence, which is otiose. You are denying the existence of the counterpositive i.e. real silver, in that locus. Silveriness in truth abides in its own substratum of silver.

The point of the concept of the counterpositive is to preserve the primal substratum ontology. If you did not have a substratum ontology you would be left with a sense data/phenomenalist ontology in which silver existed momentarily as it was experienced as such. The substratum ontology is also vital for the concept of superimposition/adhyasa.

Another translation suggested for pratiyogin (literally ‘opponent’) is absentee, thus my title of the counterpositive shaped hole for the silver in the nacre.

Intrinsic Validity in the Vedanta Paribhasa of Adhvarindra and The indefectibility of Certitude in Newman

The Validity of Knowledge is Intrinsic and Self-Evident.

The validity of knowledge generated by the above-mentioned means of knowledge originates by itself and is self-evident. To explain: Valid knowledge is that knowledge regarding something possessing a particular attribute, which has that attribute as its feature, which is conducive to successful effort, and which includes recollection as well as fresh experience. That validity is due to the totality of causes producing knowledge in general, and does not depend on extra merit, for there is no merit that abides in all valid knowledge.

Below:

The invalidity of nowledge, however, is not due to the totality of causes of knowledge in general, for in that case even valid knowledge would be invalid, but it is due to some adventitious defect.

What V.P. is proffering here is a robust form of realism. We make mistakes but these mistakes do not plunge us into general scepticism. We take things as given unless our attempts to act upon this knowledge gives rise to frustration.

This sort of trust has a similar ring to it as the general conclusions of Newman on The Indefectibility of Certitude.

 On the contrary, any conviction, false as well as true, may last; and any conviction, true as well as false, may be lost. A conviction in favour of a proposition may be exchanged for a conviction of its contradictory; and each of them may be attended, while they last, by that sense of security and repose, which a true object alone can legitimately impart. No line can be drawn between such real certitudes as have truth for their object, and apparent certitudes. No distinct test can be named, sufficient to discriminate between what may be called the false prophet and the true. What looks like certitude always is exposed to the chance of turning out to be a mistake.

The same feeling is here of the soundness of knowledge in general, that it is not due to an inherent lack of foundation that it collapses from time to time but that error is an external or adventitious hazard.

Is not looking for certainty in either a rationalist foundation or a sensible vividness merely the face and obverse of the same counterfeit coin?

We step from stone to stone in our crossing and we are not in reality wading through the stream.