How Do You Know That?

The Western tradition asked what knowledge is and tried to define it. The Indian tradition asked what the means of knowledge are and argued about the list.

Those are different questions, and the second one turns out to be more tractable.

A pramana is an accepted means by which knowledge is acquired. Perception is on everybody's list. Inference is on almost everybody's. Then it gets contested: testimony, comparison, postulation, non-apprehension, depending on the school. Some schools accept two, some six.

Here is why the list is the whole argument.

What you can claim to know is determined by the sources you are entitled to cite. Accept testimony as a means of knowledge and scripture becomes evidence, which is precisely what the orthodox schools needed. Reject it and the ground they stand on disappears.

So the dispute about how many pramanas there are is not a preliminary to the real disagreement. It is the real disagreement, conducted in the most tractable available form, and you can predict most of a school's conclusions from its list.

Charvaka, the materialists of the next chapter but one, accepted perception alone. Watch what follows.

No inference to unobserved causes, so no argument from the world to anything beyond it. No testimony, so no text has authority. No afterlife, because nobody has perceived one. No karma, no gods, no soul persisting after death. An entire metaphysics is settled by one decision about sources, and Charvaka accepted the consequences without flinching.

The interesting complication is that rejecting inference is extremely expensive, and the other schools pressed hard on it.

You cannot run a practical life without inference. You see smoke and conclude there is fire; you have not perceived the fire. Charvaka's reply was to distinguish inference within experience, which is workable, from inference beyond it to things nobody has ever observed, which is not. Whether that distinction can be held is a genuinely hard question and the schools argued about it for centuries.

Now compare the two traditions directly, because the comparison is instructive rather than decorative.

Europe defined knowledge as justified true belief and spent its energy on the definition. Testimony, which supplies the overwhelming majority of what anybody knows, arrived as a late and slightly embarrassing appendix to a theory built around a solitary knower.

India started from sources and put testimony in the centre of the dispute from the beginning, because the question of whether you may cite what you were told was immediately and obviously the question that mattered.

Two thousand years later, with most of what any person believes arriving through institutions and other people, the second framing looks like the more practical one. It is also the one that gets left out of a standard philosophy education.