This risks being threatening, upsetting, and heretical within a certain point of view I commonly see expressed on LW for reasons that will become clear if you keep reading. I don’t know if that means you shouldn’t read this if that sounds like the kind of thing you don’t want to read, but I put it out there so you can make the choice without having to engage in the specifics if you don’t want to. I don’t think you will be missing out on anything if that warning gives you a tinge of “maybe I won’t like reading this”.
My mind produces a type error when people try to perform deep and precise epistemic analysis of the dharma. That is, when they try to evaluate the truth of claims made by the dharma this seems generally fine, but when they go deep enough that they end up trying to evaluate whether the dharma itself is based on something true, I get the type error.
I’m not sure what people trying to do this turn up. My expectation is that their results looks like noise if you aggregate over all such attempts. The reason being that the dharma is not founded on episteme.
As a quick reminder, there are at least three categories of knowledge worth considering: doxa, episteme, and gnosis. Doxa might translate as “hearsay” in English; it’s about statements of the truth. Episteme is knowledge you come to believe via evaluation of the truth. Gnosis is direct, unmediated-by-ontology knowledge of reality. To this I’ll also distinguish techne from episteme, the former being experienced knowledge and the latter being reasoned knowledge.
I’ll make the probably not very bold claim that most LW rationalists value episteme above all else, accept techne as evidence, accept doxa as evidence about evidence and only weak evidence of truth itself, and mostly ignore gnosis because it is not “rational” in the sense that it cannot be put into words and it can only be pointed at by words and so cannot be analyzed because there is no ontology or categorization to allow making claims one way or the other about it.
Buddhist philosophy values gnosis above all else, then techne, then doxa, then episteme.
To say a little more, the most important thing in Buddhist thinking is seeing reality just as it is, unmediated by the “thinking” mind, by which we really mean the acts of discrimination, judgement, categorization, and ontology. To be sure, this “reality” is not external reality, which we never get to see directly, but rather our unmediated contact with it via the senses. But for all the value of gnosis, unless you plan to sit on a lotus flower in perfect equanimity forever and never act in the world, it’s not enough. Techne is the knowledge we gain through action in the world, and although it does pass judgement and discriminate, it also stays close to the ground and makes few claims. It is deeply embodied in action itself.
I’d say doxa comes next because there is a tradition of passing on the words of enlightened people as they said them and acting, at least some of the time, as if they were 100% true. Don’t confuse this for just letting anything in, though: the point is to trust in the words of those who have come before and seen more than you and doing that is often very helpful to learning to see that which was previously invisible for yourself, but it is always an action you do yourself not contingent on the teachings since those only pointed you towards where to look and always failed to put into words (because it was impossible) what you would find. The old story was that the Buddha, when asked why he should be believed, said don’t: try it for yourself and see what you find.
Episteme is last, and that’s because it’s not to be trusted. Of all the ways of knowing, episteme is the least grounded in reality. This should not be surprising, but it might be, so I’ll say a bit about it. Formal methods are not grounded. There’s a reason the grounding problem, epistemic circularity, the problem of the criterion, the problem of finding the universal prior, etc. remain fundamentally unsolved: they are unsolvable in a complete and adequate way. Instead we get pragmatic solutions that cross the chasm between reality and belief, between noumena and phenomena, between the ontic and ontology, and this leap of faith means episteme is always contingent on that leap. Even as it proves things we verify by other means, we must be careful because it’s not grounded and we have to check everything it produces by other means. This means going all the way down to gnosis if possible, and techne at the least.
None of this it to say that episteme is not useful for many things and making predictions, but we hold it at arms length because of its powerful ability to confuse us if we didn’t happen to make the right leaps where we pragmatically had to. It also always leaves something out because it requires distinctions to function, so it is always less complete. At the same time, it often makes predictions that turn out to be true, and the world is better for our powerful application of it. We just have to keep in mind what it is and what it can do and what its dangers are and engage with it in a thoughtful, careful way to avoid getting lost and confusing our perception of reality for reality itself.
So when we talk about the dharma or justify our actions on it, it’s worth noting that it is not really trying to provide consistent episteme. It’s grounded on gnosis and techne, presented via doxa, and only after the fact might we try to extend it via episteme to get an idea of where to look to understand it better. Thus it’s a strange inversion to ask the dharma for episteme-based proofs. It can’t give them, nor does it try, because its episteme is not consistent and cannot be because it chooses completeness instead.
So where does this leave us? If you want to evaluate the dharma, you’ll have to do it yourself. You can’t argue about it or reason it, you have to sit down and look at the nature of reality without conceptualizing it. Maybe that means you won’t engage with it since it doesn’t choose to accept the framing of episteme. That seems fine if you are so inclined. But then don’t be surprised if the dharma claims you are closed minded, if you feel like it attacks your identity, and if it feels just true enough that you can’t easily dismiss it out of hand although you might like to.
So when we talk about the dharma or justify our actions on it, it’s worth noting that it is not really trying to provide consistent episteme. [...] Thus it’s a strange inversion to ask the dharma for episteme-based proofs. It can’t give them, nor does it try, because its episteme is not consistent and cannot be because it chooses completeness instead.
In my view, this seems like a clear failing. The fact that the dharma comes from a tradition where this has usually been the case is not an excuse for not trying to fix it.
Yes, the method requires temporarily suspending episteme-based reasoning and engaging with less conceptual forms of seeing. But it can still be justified and explained using episteme-based models; if it could not, there would be little reason to expect that it would be worth engaging with.
This is not just a question of “the dharma has to be able to justify itself”; it’s also a question of leaving out the episteme component leaves the system impoverished, as noted e.g. here:
Recurrent training to attend to the sensate experience moment-by-moment can undermine the capacity to make meaning of experience. (The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion described this as an ‘attack on linking’, that is, on the meaning-making function of the mind.) When I ask these patients how they are feeling, or what they are thinking, or what’s on their mind, they tend to answer in terms of their sensate experience, which makes it difficult for them to engage in a transformative process of psychological self-understanding.
In important ways, it is not possible to encounter our unconscious – at least in the sense implied by this perspective – through moment-to-moment awareness of our sensate experience. Yes, in meditation we can have the experience of our thoughts bubbling just beneath the surface – what Shinzen Young calls the brain’s pre-processing – but this is not the unconscious that I’m referring to, it, or at least not all of it.
Let me give an example. Suppose that I have just learned that a close friend has died. I’m deeply saddened by this news. Moments later, I spill a cup of coffee on my new pants and become quite angry. Let’s further suppose that, throughout my life, I’ve had difficulty feeling sadness. For reasons related to my personal history, sadness frightens me. In my moment of anger, if I adopt the perspective of awareness of sensate experience, moment-by-moment, then I will have no access to the fact that I am sad. On the contrary, my sensate experience seems to reflect the fact that I am angry. But given what I know about myself, it’s quite reasonable to posit that my anger is a defense against the feeling of sadness, a feeling of which I am unconscious as I am caught up in my anger.
Hmm, I feel like there’s multiple things going on here, but I think it hinges on this:
Yes, the method requires temporarily suspending episteme-based reasoning and engaging with less conceptual forms of seeing. But it can still be justified and explained using episteme-based models; if it could not, there would be little reason to expect that it would be worth engaging with.
Different traditions vary on how much to emphasize models and episteme. None of them completely ignore it, though, only seek to keep it within its proper place. It’s not that episteme is useless, only that it is not primary. You of course should include it because it’s part of the world, and to deny it would lead to confusion and suffering. As you note with your first example especially, some people learn to turn off the discriminating mind rather than hold it as object, and they are worse for it because then they can’t engage with it anymore. Turning it off is only something you could safely do if you really had become so enlightened that you had no shadow and would never accumulate any additional shadow, and even then it seems strange from where I stand to do that although maybe it would make sense to me if I were in the position that it were a reasonable and safe option.
So to me this reads like an objection to a position I didn’t mean to take. I mean to say episteme has a place and is useful, it is not taken as primary to understanding, at some points Buddhist episteme will say contradictory things, that’s fine and expected because dharma episteme is normally post hoc rather than ante hoc (though is still expected to be rational right up until it is forced to hit a contradiction), and ante hoc is okay so long as it is then later verified via gnosis or techne.
I’ve thought about this a bit and I don’t see a way through to what you are thinking that makes you suggest this since I don’t see a reduction happening here, much less one moving towards bundling together confusion that only looks simpler. Can you say a bit more that might make your perspective on this clearer?
Maybe, although I think there is a not very clear distinction I’m trying to make between knowledge and ontological knowledge, though maybe it’s not coming across, although if it is and you have some particular argument for why, say, there isn’t or can’t be such a meaningful distinction, I’d be interested to hear it.
As for my model of reality having too many moving parts, you’re right, I’m not totally unconfused about everything yet, and it’s the place the remaining confusion lives.
the most important thing in Buddhist thinking is seeing reality just as it is, unmediated by the “thinking” mind, by which we really mean the acts of discrimination, judgement, categorization, and ontology. To be sure, this “reality” is not external reality, which we never get to see directly, but rather our unmediated contact with it via the senses.
The “unmediated contact via the senses” can only give you sensual inputs. Everything else contains interpretation. That means, you can only have “gnosis” about things like [red], [warm], etc. Including a lot of interesting stuff about your inner state, of course, but still fundamentally of the type [feeling this], [thinking that], and perhaps some usually-unknown-to-non-Buddhists [X-ing Y], etc.
Poetically speaking, these are the “atoms of experience”. (Some people would probably say “qualia”.) But some interpretation needs to come to build molecules out of these atoms. Without interpretation, you could barely distinguish between a cat and a warm pillow… which IMHO is a bit insufficient for a supposedly supreme knowledge.
It’s even worse than that, ‘raw’ sensory inputs already have ontological commitments. Those priors inform all our interpretations pre-consciously. Agree that the efficiency of various representations in the context of coherent intents is a good lens.
It’s not a very firm distinction, but techne is knowledge from doing, so I would consider playing with a hammer a way to develop techne. It certainly overlaps with the concept of gnosis, which is a bit more general and includes knowledge from direct experience that doesn’t involve “doing”, like the kind of knowledge you gain from observing. But the act of observing is a kind of thing you do, so as you see it’s fuzzy, but generally I think of techne as that which involves your body moving.
I am glad for having read this, but can’t formulate my thoughts super clearly. Just have this vague sense that you’re using too many groundless words and not connecting to the few threads of gnosis(?) that other rationalists would have available.
Some thoughts on Buddhist epistemology.
This risks being threatening, upsetting, and heretical within a certain point of view I commonly see expressed on LW for reasons that will become clear if you keep reading. I don’t know if that means you shouldn’t read this if that sounds like the kind of thing you don’t want to read, but I put it out there so you can make the choice without having to engage in the specifics if you don’t want to. I don’t think you will be missing out on anything if that warning gives you a tinge of “maybe I won’t like reading this”.
My mind produces a type error when people try to perform deep and precise epistemic analysis of the dharma. That is, when they try to evaluate the truth of claims made by the dharma this seems generally fine, but when they go deep enough that they end up trying to evaluate whether the dharma itself is based on something true, I get the type error.
I’m not sure what people trying to do this turn up. My expectation is that their results looks like noise if you aggregate over all such attempts. The reason being that the dharma is not founded on episteme.
As a quick reminder, there are at least three categories of knowledge worth considering: doxa, episteme, and gnosis. Doxa might translate as “hearsay” in English; it’s about statements of the truth. Episteme is knowledge you come to believe via evaluation of the truth. Gnosis is direct, unmediated-by-ontology knowledge of reality. To this I’ll also distinguish techne from episteme, the former being experienced knowledge and the latter being reasoned knowledge.
I’ll make the probably not very bold claim that most LW rationalists value episteme above all else, accept techne as evidence, accept doxa as evidence about evidence and only weak evidence of truth itself, and mostly ignore gnosis because it is not “rational” in the sense that it cannot be put into words and it can only be pointed at by words and so cannot be analyzed because there is no ontology or categorization to allow making claims one way or the other about it.
Buddhist philosophy values gnosis above all else, then techne, then doxa, then episteme.
To say a little more, the most important thing in Buddhist thinking is seeing reality just as it is, unmediated by the “thinking” mind, by which we really mean the acts of discrimination, judgement, categorization, and ontology. To be sure, this “reality” is not external reality, which we never get to see directly, but rather our unmediated contact with it via the senses. But for all the value of gnosis, unless you plan to sit on a lotus flower in perfect equanimity forever and never act in the world, it’s not enough. Techne is the knowledge we gain through action in the world, and although it does pass judgement and discriminate, it also stays close to the ground and makes few claims. It is deeply embodied in action itself.
I’d say doxa comes next because there is a tradition of passing on the words of enlightened people as they said them and acting, at least some of the time, as if they were 100% true. Don’t confuse this for just letting anything in, though: the point is to trust in the words of those who have come before and seen more than you and doing that is often very helpful to learning to see that which was previously invisible for yourself, but it is always an action you do yourself not contingent on the teachings since those only pointed you towards where to look and always failed to put into words (because it was impossible) what you would find. The old story was that the Buddha, when asked why he should be believed, said don’t: try it for yourself and see what you find.
Episteme is last, and that’s because it’s not to be trusted. Of all the ways of knowing, episteme is the least grounded in reality. This should not be surprising, but it might be, so I’ll say a bit about it. Formal methods are not grounded. There’s a reason the grounding problem, epistemic circularity, the problem of the criterion, the problem of finding the universal prior, etc. remain fundamentally unsolved: they are unsolvable in a complete and adequate way. Instead we get pragmatic solutions that cross the chasm between reality and belief, between noumena and phenomena, between the ontic and ontology, and this leap of faith means episteme is always contingent on that leap. Even as it proves things we verify by other means, we must be careful because it’s not grounded and we have to check everything it produces by other means. This means going all the way down to gnosis if possible, and techne at the least.
None of this it to say that episteme is not useful for many things and making predictions, but we hold it at arms length because of its powerful ability to confuse us if we didn’t happen to make the right leaps where we pragmatically had to. It also always leaves something out because it requires distinctions to function, so it is always less complete. At the same time, it often makes predictions that turn out to be true, and the world is better for our powerful application of it. We just have to keep in mind what it is and what it can do and what its dangers are and engage with it in a thoughtful, careful way to avoid getting lost and confusing our perception of reality for reality itself.
So when we talk about the dharma or justify our actions on it, it’s worth noting that it is not really trying to provide consistent episteme. It’s grounded on gnosis and techne, presented via doxa, and only after the fact might we try to extend it via episteme to get an idea of where to look to understand it better. Thus it’s a strange inversion to ask the dharma for episteme-based proofs. It can’t give them, nor does it try, because its episteme is not consistent and cannot be because it chooses completeness instead.
So where does this leave us? If you want to evaluate the dharma, you’ll have to do it yourself. You can’t argue about it or reason it, you have to sit down and look at the nature of reality without conceptualizing it. Maybe that means you won’t engage with it since it doesn’t choose to accept the framing of episteme. That seems fine if you are so inclined. But then don’t be surprised if the dharma claims you are closed minded, if you feel like it attacks your identity, and if it feels just true enough that you can’t easily dismiss it out of hand although you might like to.
In my view, this seems like a clear failing. The fact that the dharma comes from a tradition where this has usually been the case is not an excuse for not trying to fix it.
Yes, the method requires temporarily suspending episteme-based reasoning and engaging with less conceptual forms of seeing. But it can still be justified and explained using episteme-based models; if it could not, there would be little reason to expect that it would be worth engaging with.
This is not just a question of “the dharma has to be able to justify itself”; it’s also a question of leaving out the episteme component leaves the system impoverished, as noted e.g. here:
and here:
Hmm, I feel like there’s multiple things going on here, but I think it hinges on this:
Different traditions vary on how much to emphasize models and episteme. None of them completely ignore it, though, only seek to keep it within its proper place. It’s not that episteme is useless, only that it is not primary. You of course should include it because it’s part of the world, and to deny it would lead to confusion and suffering. As you note with your first example especially, some people learn to turn off the discriminating mind rather than hold it as object, and they are worse for it because then they can’t engage with it anymore. Turning it off is only something you could safely do if you really had become so enlightened that you had no shadow and would never accumulate any additional shadow, and even then it seems strange from where I stand to do that although maybe it would make sense to me if I were in the position that it were a reasonable and safe option.
So to me this reads like an objection to a position I didn’t mean to take. I mean to say episteme has a place and is useful, it is not taken as primary to understanding, at some points Buddhist episteme will say contradictory things, that’s fine and expected because dharma episteme is normally post hoc rather than ante hoc (though is still expected to be rational right up until it is forced to hit a contradiction), and ante hoc is okay so long as it is then later verified via gnosis or techne.
>unmediated-by-ontology knowledge of reality.
I think this is a confused concept, related to wrong-way-reduction.
I’ve thought about this a bit and I don’t see a way through to what you are thinking that makes you suggest this since I don’t see a reduction happening here, much less one moving towards bundling together confusion that only looks simpler. Can you say a bit more that might make your perspective on this clearer?
In particular, I think under this formulation knowledge and onotology largely refer to the same thing. Which is part of the reason I think this formulation is mistaken. Separately, I think ‘reality’ has too many moving parts to be useful for the role it’s being used for here.
Maybe, although I think there is a not very clear distinction I’m trying to make between knowledge and ontological knowledge, though maybe it’s not coming across, although if it is and you have some particular argument for why, say, there isn’t or can’t be such a meaningful distinction, I’d be interested to hear it.
As for my model of reality having too many moving parts, you’re right, I’m not totally unconfused about everything yet, and it’s the place the remaining confusion lives.
The “unmediated contact via the senses” can only give you sensual inputs. Everything else contains interpretation. That means, you can only have “gnosis” about things like [red], [warm], etc. Including a lot of interesting stuff about your inner state, of course, but still fundamentally of the type [feeling this], [thinking that], and perhaps some usually-unknown-to-non-Buddhists [X-ing Y], etc.
Poetically speaking, these are the “atoms of experience”. (Some people would probably say “qualia”.) But some interpretation needs to come to build molecules out of these atoms. Without interpretation, you could barely distinguish between a cat and a warm pillow… which IMHO is a bit insufficient for a supposedly supreme knowledge.
It’s even worse than that, ‘raw’ sensory inputs already have ontological commitments. Those priors inform all our interpretations pre-consciously. Agree that the efficiency of various representations in the context of coherent intents is a good lens.
I agree with KaJ Solata and Viliam that episteme is underweighted in Buddhism, but thanks for explicating that world view
Could you clarify the distinction between techne and gnosis? Is it something like playing around with a hammer and seeing how it works?
It’s not a very firm distinction, but techne is knowledge from doing, so I would consider playing with a hammer a way to develop techne. It certainly overlaps with the concept of gnosis, which is a bit more general and includes knowledge from direct experience that doesn’t involve “doing”, like the kind of knowledge you gain from observing. But the act of observing is a kind of thing you do, so as you see it’s fuzzy, but generally I think of techne as that which involves your body moving.
I am glad for having read this, but can’t formulate my thoughts super clearly. Just have this vague sense that you’re using too many groundless words and not connecting to the few threads of gnosis(?) that other rationalists would have available.