Balagangadhara

Social psychology, for instance, speaks of ‘categorization theory’, and we do use ‘categorization’ also in the sense of classification. However, unless one gives a technical meaning to ‘category’ (which one can), these usages do not violate the primary distinction between a word from some natural language and its meaning. Consider a classificatory scheme, say, cubes. Here, ‘cube’ is a word, it …

Let me give the gist of the consensus and overlook philosophical nuances about categories. Consider the following sentences: ‘It is raining’, ‘het regent’, ‘Es Regnet’, ‘Baarish aa raha hai’. All these sentences have the same meaning, namely that it is raining. Or it could also be said that they all express the same “proposition”. So, “meaning” and “proposition” are used as quasi-synonyms; and …

Many facts are interconnected within a culture. (The same applies to Nature too.) Some hypothesis or another notices some of these facts as facts, and it is able to provide an explanation (using the term ’explanation’ rather loosely) for them. This explanation helps us understand the phenomenon (means merely the appearance) in question because the theory or hypothesis under discussion is able to …

When a religion claims that it is the word of God and that the word is unconditionally true; and that, further, the word is about the Cosmos: everything that was, is and shall be. So, when I say that religion is such an entity, namely, it claims that it is the word of God and that it claims to be unconditionally true and that it is about the Cosmos, I am accepting the self description of religion. …

Are there accounts about the origin of religion? Yes, there are at least two kinds. One kind tries to localise the origin of religion in human beings and the other in God. 1.1. If religion is what it also says about itself, namely, it is the word of God, what are we trying to answer when we try to answer the issue of the origin of religion? Are we trying to give a scientific answer to the …

If we understand the word ’tradition’ to mean ‘a set of practices’, then the question is this: why continue a set of practices? When someone ‘justifies’ (I will soon explain why I use scare quotes for this) this by referring to the existence of a set of practices, what exactly is the person doing? One way of looking at it is to say that the person ‘justifies’ his actions and understand …

Lets become clear about the nature of my claims about worldviews. The word carries multiple meanings. It has partly to do with the multiple meanings of the component words: world’ and ‘view’. In daily language-use, ‘world’ is used to pick out (a) a spatial and temporal slice of the cosmos (b) and/or the entire Cosmos itself. The first, the slices, are many: from the ‘social world’ to the …

To begin with the question raised in ‘The Heathen in his blindness: Asia, the West and the dynamic of religion’: Do all cultures, peoples, and individuals need a world view to navigate themselves in the world? The answer is in the negative because religion is not a cultural universal and the only examples we have of world views are religions. Are the atheists, free thinkers, and people ignorant of …

Is enlightenment learnable? (In a less loaded formulation: Can all people be happy?) My answer is an unequivocal ‘yes’. Before we go further, we need to be clear what exactly this sentence says: enlightenment is not, say, the result of some genes (that explains why we get molars and not tusks, for instance), nor is it a law of nature (that explains why, say, water boils when heated and does not …

You do not want to call our natural sciences as ‘knowledge’. I do not even mind that. (For instance, you might want to define ‘knowledge’ as ’true and justified belief’. You might show me that our theories in natural sciences are only believed to be true and are not proved to be true. Therefore, you might want to say that our natural sciences are not ‘knowledge’ according to your definition. Fair …

Consider the following possibility: let us assume that in some of my writings, I reach the same conclusion as some or another ideologue from Hindutva. (Of course, neither Steve Farmer nor Michael Witzel shows that this is the case. But that is not the issue.) In other words, let us assume that, with respect to some or another issue, I arrive at the same conclusion as people from the Hinudtva …

You ask whether or not it was ‘factual’ that a ‘paraiah’ was not allowed on the same street as a Nair or a Brahmin. The evidence we have says that a Paraiah was not allowed to be on the same street as a Nair, but it is not clear whether it also applies to the presence of a Brahmin. First, here is some of the evidence. The Portuguese traveler Duarte Barbosa was among the first to talk about it in …

Until the sixties of the previous century, there was some kind of consensus about the nature of scientific enterprise. One strand within it had to do with the nature of facts. One thought that scientists collected facts (data) and formulated hypothesis (or theories) to explain them. This distinction between theory and facts was seen as an absolute distinction: facts (or data) existed in Nature …

Is the Bhagavad Gita revelation? E.g. 15:15, rendered by one translator as “And I am seated in the hearts of all; from Me are memory, knowledge, as well as their loss; I am verily that which has to be known by all the Vedas; I am indeed the author of the Vedanta as well as the knower of the Vedas”.If nothing else, the authorship of Vedanta is what is revealed here. But the claim is there both to …

One has faith in God and, therefore, trusts that His message is also The Truth. That is to say, one should not predicate the attitude of having ‘faith in’ to the EI account directly. There is a very important additional reason for being clear about our terminologies. Consider the distinction between having no idea that the Cosmos is an EI entity and having an account that makes the Cosmos into …

X says that Christological dilemma is some kind of theological logic and suggests that ordinary Christians are not affected by this artificial problematic. There are two issues here worth looking at separately. Is the problematic artificial? Well, it depends. I am not claiming that every Christian (past, present and future) is aware of this problematic, of course. This is a general formulation …

What does it matter where they came from and how? Newton did not travel through the Cosmos and visit planets in order to formulate his theories of planetary motion. That guy did not even visit India to find out whether the naked fakirs levitate or not. With the proverbial falling of the apple on his head (this story is too beautiful to let go!), Sir Isaac made claims about gravitation and flatly …

Social issues, inherently, are neither paradoxical any more than they are contradictory. It is the formulation of these issues that gives birth to paradoxes, contradictions and such like. (For the simple reason that ‘paradox’, ‘contradiction’, etc. are properties of statements, not of objects and events.) If there is a ‘paradox’ of freedom, then it lies not in the situation where one tradition (or …

Each time I tell someone, whether in a one-to-one discussion or in a conference, “there is no religion in India”, I get the following answer: “Of course, that depends on how you define ‘religion’”. I answer as follows: “In that case, here is my definition: ‘Religion=what does not exist in India’. Will that do? If it is really a question of the definition of a word, why does one need to write such …

In many cultures, especially in the Indian case, it is important to understand that stories are not explanations. They are neither true nor false because they do not describe ‘factual’ events; they do not claim that they do either. Unlike the Bible, the Puranas do not have to be true or known to be true for them to play the role they do in the Indian culture. The Indian myths neither allegorize …