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Thesis Dharmottara’s mirage is not really a Gettier case, and calling it one flattens both traditions

Meera Kulkarni Fellow
· 5 replies · 247 views
Knowledge & beliefAnalyticBuddhistIndianDharmakīrtiDharmottaraEdmund Gettier#comparative-philosophy#factivity#gettier-problem#pramana
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Where it stands

Every year someone on a comparative course says "the Buddhists found the Gettier problem a thousand years early", and every year I nod and feel uneasy. Let me try to say why, and you can tell me where it breaks.

The case: a traveller sees what looks like water shimmering ahead, believes there is water, and there is water, at a slightly different spot, hidden, while what he actually saw was a mirage. Dharmottara, an eighth-century commentator on Dharmakīrti, uses it while explaining what counts as a valid cognition. Structurally it is a perfect Gettier case: a belief formed in a normally good way, true, and true by accident.

But look at what the example is for. Dharmottara is not testing a definition of knowledge as justified true belief. He is working inside a theory in which a pramāṇa, a means of valid cognition, is by definition non-deceptive. A cognition that only happens to land on the truth is not a weakly justified pramāṇa; it is not a pramāṇa at all. Truth is built into the status from the start.

Gettier's cases need the opposite assumption: that you can be fully justified and still wrong, so that justification and truth are independent and can come apart. Remove that independence and the "problem" cannot even be set up.

So my thesis: the mirage and the ten coins look identical but do different jobs. One illustrates a definition; the other refutes one. Treating them as the same discovery makes the Indian theory look like an early draft of analytic epistemology, and makes Gettier look like a rediscovery of something the Buddhists had already solved. Neither is quite true.

Objections welcome. I am arguing this more firmly than I believe it.

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5 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Kenneth Leung Chi-ho

    For Fellow

    I'm with Meera on the translation point. Avisaṃvādin is usually rendered "non-deceptive" or "non-belying", and in Dharmakīrti it is tied to practical success, to a cognition leading you to an object that can do what you expect it to do. That is not the concept of justification that Gettier's targets were working with. When we line the two cases up we quietly convert one vocabulary into the other, and the resemblance is partly an artefact of the conversion.

  2. Tomasz Wójcik

    For Fellow

    A small formal point in Meera's favour. Zagzebski argued in 1994 that Gettier cases are inescapable for any analysis on which justification does not guarantee truth. An infallibilist notion of pramāṇa escapes by construction. So, strictly, "not a Gettier case within the theory" is correct. The interesting cost moves elsewhere: you now have to say how anyone can tell, from the inside, whether their cognition is a pramāṇa.

    Helpful · 3

Against the thesis 2

  1. Oskar Nyberg

    Against Fellow

    I think you've proved the opposite of what you meant to. Why would anyone build truth into the definition of a valid cognition? Because they had seen that justification without a guaranteed link to truth lets in lucky cases. The mirage is the evidence that motivates factivity. That makes it exactly a Gettier case: the counterexample that tells you what any adequate account must exclude.

    If anything, the Buddhist position resembles Williamson's knowledge-first view far more than it resembles the analysis Gettier was attacking. That is an interesting parallel in its own right, and it does not need the "a thousand years early" slogan.

    Helpful · 3
    1. Meera Kulkarni

      Fellow

      Oskar, that is a good hit. Let me revise. Within its own framework, the mirage is not a Gettier case, because there is no room for a justified-but-unlucky cognition. Seen from outside, as evidence about why someone would make validity factive, it plays exactly the role Gettier's cases played for Williamson. So: same intuition, different theoretical work. I'll keep my unease about the slogan and drop the claim that the comparison flattens anything by itself.

      Helpful · 1
  2. Vikram Sethi

    Against Fellow

    Speaking as a teacher rather than a specialist: I would still put the mirage on the board next to the ten coins. Students should know that the intuition is not a Western peculiarity. The care Meera is asking for belongs in the second lesson, not in a decision to leave the case out of the first.

    Helpful · 2