Basics

Assume that you get a Ph.D student who wants to do medical research. He comes to you and tells you that he wants to find out an answer to the burning question about why people get sick. Would you be able to guide this student in answering his question or give one answer to it? Your answer would be: it depends. You would also further say to him, ‘choose a particular disease, choose a particular …

Depending on the context of the discussion (say a dispute about some aspect of the Indian culture), the disputants can treat wearing the bindi or a saree as facts. However, in another context of the discussion, these facts might become theoretical claims. For instance, is the Indian woman wearing a bindi or an Indian male wearing kumkum on his forehead being religious or not? Consider, for …

There is, on the one hand, the intellectual tradition of expressing opinions and points of view. Here, as it suits thoughtful minds, one tries to express ideas carefully and in a nuanced fashion. Recent peer-opinions are taken into account; generalizations are avoided; the attention is on the specific and the concrete; and, where possible, one’s ideas are either founded upon or embroidered by some …

There is a very interesting notion of “critique”: it begins with Kant and stretches through Marx in the German philosophical tradition. In fact, it is most developed in Marx when he says he develops a “critique” of the “science” of political economy, a “critique”, which, he says, is nonetheless a “science”. He does not develop a “scientific critique” of political economy: he develops a critique of …

You ask whether ‘in principle’ a neurobiological theory on religion could “account” for the experience of the believers. The answer depends on what kind of an account you are asking for and what you have in mind when you say ‘in principle’. If you mean by ‘account’, whether it could predict or even explain, I do not think so. We know that, at the least, we are made up of atoms. Your question, in …

Many come up with criticisms like ‘Buddhist logics are different’ or ‘one has to follow Indian logics’. These criticisms sound profound! They are damn shallow, unless they answer the following questions. What is their structure? What are their axioms? What are their rules of inferences? What are some some crucial meta-logical theorems (do they all have deduction theorems?) etc.

Steve Farmer is not an expert on secularism only in the sense that he has followed it from the ‘outside’ (meaning, probably, he has not written anything about the issue himself). Apparently, the reason why he has not contributed to the debate has to do with the fact that (a) no legitimate researcher can take the debate seriously; and (b) Farmer is one such. Witness how he describes it: “I’ve …

Opening a dictionary to find out the meaning of an English word might indeed be an elementary student’s choice, but, if used as a methodology for settling scientific and philosophical discussions, I am afraid, it is a rather poor choice. Imagine a physicist living around the turn of the last century doing something similar when Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity. “Oh! I say,” we …

I have discovered that there is a fundamental difference between arguments and theory-building. As a philosopher, I have come to think that one could argue almost any position, within reasonable limits. Mostly, they consist of putting across plausible, or even logically possible considerations in order to show that either some point is plausible or that it could be true. Up to a point, arguments …

I have also come across expressions of similar thoughts and feelings both in India and in Europe and the United States. However, I think there are multiple grounds that generate such questions. Here are some I have been able to identify. When people hear me say that the western intellectuals of the last three hundred years or more are completely wrong, invariably people skeptically wonder whether …

I have come to accept that the most interesting facts that a theory explains are those of the theory itself. Furthermore, a ’theory’, which collects all kinds of facts first and tries to ’explain’ them subsequently, is worse than having no theory. Such a theory is completely ad hoc and is cognitively uninteresting. It is pernicious too because it generates the belief that one understands such …

I do not have a theory of meaning. I do not know which of the many fragmentary theories of meaning I should choose from and why. Even though I acknowledge the importance of the topic, I do not feel called upon to do research on it. So far, I have been able to steer clear of the topic in an interesting way: I am able to show that what appears as translation problem or a meaning problem (how should …

I want to go deeper into the claim of my earlier post that Shabnum Tejanis and Neera Chandhokes of this world do not think but merely talk. In other words, is it possible to identify the problems with their accounts (that explicates more clearly why I say that they do not think) in such a way that it is susceptible to some sort of solution? If, indeed, we can show that such people do not think and …

Contrast sets have multiple functions depending on the contexts in which they are used. For instance, in the case of theories about some phenomena, they can be used to test the robustness of the theories: why do unsupported objects on earth fall downwards instead of floating? Why did the Primitive Man invent ‘religion’ instead of doing any number of other things he could have done? And so on. In …

X says: “Modern prostitution is a very specific institution with the features of pimps, forced sex, kidnapped women, drug addicted women, immigrants lured to foreign shores on false pretences, and so on. If we insist on precision in ideas, then it is counterproductive to confuse matters by calling Apsaras prostitutes without first showing that at least some of the above conditions hold true and …

X says: “Wendy Doniger translates all the Sanskrit words into English and thereby ends up distorting their meaning. Dharma becomes religion, Varna becomes color, and apparently she ends up even translating the names of some tribes into English.” Assuming that this is the case (assumption is on my part because I have neither read her translation nor do I intend reading it), what is the problem? Out …

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 …

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 …