Buddhist Epistemology

[integral]

Sources of knowledge and justification -AI

Buddhist concept	Western counterpart	How they relate
Pramana (valid cognition; Dharmakirti: “non-deceptive cognition”)	Theory of justification, especially reliabilism	Both ask which cognitive processes reliably track truth. Buddhist pramana is about non-deceptive cognition, not the justified-true-belief analysis.
Pratyaksa (direct perception, free of concepts)	Nonconceptual content; sense-data theories	Dignaga says raw perception contains no conceptual construction. Close to sense-data views, and unlike direct realism.
Anumana and trairupya (inference and the three conditions of a valid reason)	Deductive logic, syllogism	Dharmakirti's conditions work like validity rules. It is closer to Aristotelian syllogism than to modern symbolic logic.
Agama (testimony from a reliable source)	Testimony as a source of knowledge (Reid, Coady)	Dharmakirti tried to justify trusting the Buddha by his reliability on checkable matters, then extended that to unobservable ones, which is the contested step.
Yogipratyaksa (yogic perception)	Religious or mystical experience as evidence (William James, Alston)	Treated as a valid source. The Western debate is the same: how to separate real insight from expectation (Katz's constructivism).
Three wisdoms (heard, thought, meditated)	Knowledge by testimony, by reasoning, by acquaintance (Russell)	A good fit: learn it, reason about it, experience it.

 

Mind, concepts and language

Buddhist concept	Western counterpart	How they relate
Kalpana (conceptual construction)	Kant's synthesis; concept-ladenness of observation (Hanson, Kuhn)	Both say concepts shape experience. For Kant they are necessary conditions. For Buddhists they are a distortion to be seen through.
Svalaksana / samanyalaksana (particulars and generals)	Nominalism vs realism about universals	Buddhists are nominalists: universals are mental constructs.
Apoha (meaning by exclusion)	Nominalist and differential theories of meaning (Saussure)	A concept means “not-other,” not a shared essence. The fit is loose.
Svasamvedana (reflexive self-awareness)	Brentano's inner perception; Sartre's pre-reflective consciousness	Each cognition knows itself, which avoids the regress that higher-order theories face.
Alaya-vijnana and bija (store of seeds)	The unconscious; dispositional states; Husserl's passive synthesis	A store of latent dispositions shaping experience. Not identical to Freudian or Jungian ideas.
Vijnaptimatra (representation-only)	Idealism (Berkeley), Kantian transcendental idealism	Scholars disagree on whether Yogacara denies external reality or only claims we never know it directly.

 

Skepticism, method and reasoning

Buddhist concept	Western counterpart	How they relate
Two truths (conventional and ultimate)	Appearance vs reality; Kant's phenomena and noumena; levels of description	Madhyamaka says even the ultimate is empty, so there is no ground behind appearances. That separates it from Kant.
Prasanga (reductio) and catuskoti (four-cornered logic)	Reductio ad absurdum; paraconsistent logic (Graham Priest)	The reductio reading is standard. Priest's reading of the tetralemma is contested.
Madhyamaka dialectic	Pyrrhonian skepticism (Sextus Empiricus)	Both suspend judgment, partly aimed at peace of mind. Beckwith argues for direct influence, which is disputed.
Daigi (great doubt, Zen)	Cartesian methodological doubt; Socratic aporia	Descartes doubts to find certainty. Zen doubt aims to dissolve the questioner.
Debate training	Dialectic, disputation	Formal adversarial debate as a method of testing arguments.

 

Self-deception, bias and mental training

Buddhist concept	Western counterpart	How they relate
Viparyasa (four distortions), anusaya, prapañca, moha	Cognitive biases, motivated reasoning (Kahneman, Tversky)	Both catalogue systematic errors. The Buddhist list comes from introspection and aims at liberation. The Western list is tested in experiments.
Yoniso manasikara, sati, sampajanna (wise attention, mindfulness, clear comprehension)	Metacognition; virtue epistemology (Zagzebski)	Knowing as a trained trait of character.
Vipassana / dhammavicaya (insight; investigation)	Phenomenology (Husserl's epoche); introspection; neurophenomenology (Varela)	Systematic first-person observation. Buddhism trains it far more deliberately.
Ehipassiko (come and see)	Empiricism, but with only private verification	Appeals to experience without independent replication.
Anatman / skandhas	Hume's bundle theory; Parfit's reductionism	Strong parallel. Both deny a unified, persisting self. Relevant to OP's barcode.

 

What each side has that the other lacks

Western only	Buddhist only (or far more developed)
Symbolic logic, probability and Bayesian reasoning	Systematic attention and introspective training
Experimental method, statistics, replication	A framework that links knowing to ending suffering
Falsification and philosophy of science	Detailed maps of meditative states and their pitfalls
Experimentally measured cognitive biases	The analysis of how the sense of self is constructed
Peer review and a norm of revising foundations

 

 

 

 

I was surprised to find that Buddhism actually strongly focuses on epistemology. It's just never taught. And basically, no one knows about it. 😂

Edited 21 hours ago by integral

[enchanted]

"In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped" -Lao Tsu

I prefer Taoism myself because of these quotes.