The Art of Non-asserting: Dialogue with Nāgārjuna

Abstract

In his excellent paper, Nāgā rjuna as anti-realist, Siderits showed that it makes sense to perform a connection between the position of the Buddhist Nāgārjuna and contemporary anti realist theses such as Dummett’s one. The point of this talk is to argue that this connection is an important one to perform for one’s correct understanding of what Nāgārjuna is doing when he criticizes the contemporary Indian theories of knowledge and assertion, first section, but as soon as the theories of argumentation are involved, this connection can be implemented in a better way from an other anti realist perspective, namely the one of Dialogical logic (Erlangen school), in which the signification is given in terms of rules in a language game.

The philosophical issues are to hold an interpretation of the type of assertion performed by Nāgārjuna. We here aim at making a rational reconstruction of his chief claim ‘I do not assert any proposition’ in which a proposition is considered as the set of its strategies of justification.

As for the last section, the point will be to apply these analyses to Buddhist practice. We will in this section consider the conventional character of human activities as the fact that any speech act is performed within a dialogue under ad-hoc restrictions; and the question of one’s progress in the soteriological path to liberation will be asked.