Event Detail

Thu Nov 5, 2020
180 Doe Library
5–6:30 PM
Laura Guerrero (Utah Valley University)
Buddhist Reductionism, Fictionalism, and Expressibility

While committed to the view that Buddhist Reductionism offers the best account of the Abhidharma distinction of the two truths, Mark Siderits (2009) argues that Buddhist Reductionism has the surprising consequence of making itself inexpressible. This inexpressibility follows from the semantic insulation between conventional and ultimate discourses that Siderits argues is required in order to preserve classical logic for both types of discourse, avoiding contradiction and bivalence failure. I argue that inexpressibility is a problematic consequence that threatens to constitute a reductio of Buddhist Reductionism. However, there is an alternative fictionalist formulation of Buddhist Reductionism, similar to the one offered by Goodman (2005) that still captures the sense in which conventional discourse supervenes on ultimate discourse while avoiding the concerns that motivated the semantic insulation that rendered mixed vocabulary discourse inexpressible. Thus, I argue that Buddhist Reductionism can be, when properly formulated, both expressible and ultimately true.