Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
University of Hawai'i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Philosophy
East and West.
http://www.jstor.org
216 Matilal
not perceive a physical object, like a table, but that what we perceive is a
different sort of "thing" altogether (for example, on various occasions, various
sizes and shapes of a table), which they call sense-data. With the introduction
of this new term the sense-datum philosophers introduced a way of approaching problems of perception which has generated a good deal of modern
philosophic literature.
The meaning or connotation of the term "sense-datum" has not remained
unchanged in the hands of modern philosophers. What is generally agreed is
that a sense-datum is "not a physical reality." But while for G. E. Moore and
his followers a sense-datum is the immediate object of perception which may
or may not be identical to a part of the physical object, for C. D. Broad and
others it is the immediate object in perception, taken to be nonphysical.4 The
denotation of the term, however, includes, in any case, such items as the
elliptical appearance and the circular appearance of a penny, as well as such
things as mirage-appearancein the desert or the double-moon appearance.
What the Sanskrit philosophers call pratibhdsa (appearance) is not strictly a
sense-datum in many respects, for they did not pay much attention to the
variability of the shapes or appearances or components in the perception of
the same physical object, although they felt that the problem of explaining
nonveridical perceptions, hallucination, and error was one of the central
focuses of their philosophy. In a perceptual illusion, say a mirage-illusion, they
noted the duality or disparity between what appears in a perceptual experience
(that is, a pratibhdsa) of water, and what we are confronted with in the
situation, the interplay of hot air and the sunray.5 This appearance of water in
a mirage-illusion may be a sense-datum, but the perceptual consciousness here
already involves a judgment, an interpretation of the datum. The philosophic
motivation for introducing the sense-datum or even the "appearance" language was the Cartesian search for certainty, for the data are supposed to be
incorrigible and indubitable. They are also called "the given" because they are
felt to be independent of our judgments. They are self-evident and our beliefs,
to fulfill their claims to be knowledge, must be based upon them in some way
or other. But the pratibhdsa (appearance) is not an indubitable datum, for the
Indian epistemologists argue that as long as it is describable in language it
becomes the datum interpreted, or taken to be something F (for example,
water). So our "F-appearance" in a state of (perceptual) consciousness implies
that something is being identified as an F, or the property of being an F is
attributedsomewhere. If what we seem to cognize on a particular occasion is
expressible in language as "this is F" or "this is an F" then the cognition in
question is said to have an "F-appearance." The dispute among the Indian
philosophers centered, to a great extent, on the exact (ontological) status of
the "F-appearance," mainly the "F-appearance" of what we call a nonveridical perceptual experience (such as a mirage-illusion of water).
The word "alambana" is a flexible term in Sanskrit. It is not the sense-
217
218 Matilal
219
220 Matilal
and others) claim that we make a causal inference and are thus led from sensedata to material objects. The phenomenalists, such as Mill, would regard
material things as permanent possibilities of sensations. Yet H. H. Price has
argued that a phenomenalist must hold that sense-data are neither mental nor
physical, and that they are not caused at all and they are not even real in the
ordinary sense of the word. 1 Price continues:
According to him [the Phenomenalist] we must simply take the sense-given
continuum as a going concern. There it is, and all statements in which material
things and events are mentioned, are ultimately statements about it-about
the manner in which it does or could develop itself, whether now or in the past
or in the future.
According to Price, the phenomenalist is right in rejecting the idea that
sense-data are causally dependent upon the thing, (that is, a table) as their
"source." For if by "thing" we mean the "complete thing," then this complete
thing is a combination of the family of sense-data and the physical occupant of
the particular space, and thus it would involve the absurdity of saying that A
(the sense-datum) is causally dependent upon AB (the complete thing, that is,
family of sense-data and the physical occupant). If by "thing" we mean,
however, the physical occupant only, then Price allows that the table or other
physical occupant may well be the remote cause of the sense-data composing
the family. And in the same view, it can be claimed that sense-data are also
causally dependent upon the organism of the sentient. The atomic data of the
Sautrantika, however, are stated to be independent of the mind or consciousness. They are not mental, and it would be also difficult to call them physical.
But they are claimed to be "external" to consciousness. Certainly they are not
caused by the material object, the table. Rather it is believed that they cause
the so-called appearance of the false table, the "material object." Thus, the
Sautrantika disagrees with an important part of the thesis of the Causal
Theorists: namely, "M (a material object) is present to my senses" is equivalent to "M causes a sense-datum with which I am acquainted." Besides, the
Sautrantika believes that the existence of the extramental reality, that is, the
atomic data, is only inferable from the appearances (pratibhdsa) of the gross
material object in our perceptual consciousness. For (a) the atomic data must
have caused the arising of this perceptual consciousness; and (b) by so causing
the perceptual consciousness to arise, they have also caused indirectly the
appearance of a gross material object, which is a mere appearance, only
imagined to be real.
If we have followed the Sautrantika argument so far, we would be in a
better position to appreciate and understand Diinnga's arguments in his
Examination of the Alambana, where he rejects the view that the alambana is
something external to consciousness. The opponent of Difinnga, presumably a
Sautrantika, has argued that these five kinds of atomistic data would act as the
alambana to give "causal" support to the five kinds of perception due to the
221
222 Matilal
223
224 Matilal
we have prejudiced the issue. If however, we are already familiar with the
causal ancestry of both which determined the issue, the issue has already been
resolved for us, and we do not need any further arbiter of truth. We may just
kick, with Johnson, the stone in front to prove that it is real.
NOTES
1. B. K. Matilal, "A Critiqueof BuddhistIdealism,"BuddhistStudiesin Honourof I. B.
Horner,ed. L. Cousins,A. Kunst & K. R. Norman(Boston: D. Reidel PublishingCompany,
1974),pp. 139-169.
2. H. M. Smith,"Is Therea ProblemAbout Sense-Data?"AristotelianSoc. Suppl.15 (1936):
84.
3. GeorgeEdwardMoore,"SomeJudgementsof Perception,"in Philosophical
Studies,(New
York:Harcourt,Brace& Co., 1922),pp. 231-232.
4. C. D. Broad,ScientificThought(London:K. Paul,Trench,Trubner& CO., 1923),p. 244.
5. See Vatsyayana, Nydyabh.sya 1.1.4.