Epistemology & Ontology — What is that?
I hear a common refrain these days as people engage with my posts. The common sentiment is — it all sounds nice & simple but I can’t get myself to believe it because I haven’t seen it. While my intent is not to prove anything to anyone or debate, but I knew that viewing philosophy through usual paradigms will not get us far. So there must be additional methods. That got me researching.
Most of our formal education was based on appealing & absorbing information through the 5 external senses — sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. Our examinations largely expected us to memorise and reproduce information. With that, we formed a set of paradigms — what we know & believe as truths. All came through the 5 senses which and we hold as absolute truths. The minute we delve into philosophy, that paradigm breaks. Additional methods are needed to grasp the subject. Learning, absorbing, evaluating philosophy through the 5 external senses is like asking a fish to bicycle and then declaring it a losing idea. So what are the additional tools and instruments?
The Rishis/Saints who wrote the ancient Hindu Scriptures knew this and prescribed the following in combination or specific ones to various topics.
1. Perception — The 5 external senses which help us create perceptions continue as the starting point for philosophy.
2. Critical Reasoning — It is the quest for truth in a statement, challenging assumptions and most importantly listening to others. Hindu philosophy expects you to challenge and then accept.
3. Analogy Reasoning — This is extensively used to decipher mythologies & epics like Mahabharata and Ramayana. This is to explore deeper meaning, relationships, cause and effect. While the story is a way to gain attention, it is the meaning which has value.
4. Supposition — An idea where you know some part is true but you don’t know which part and hence needs experimenting. This is to also test hypothesis & compare. Hindu philosophy again asks you to experiment before acceptance. All Rishis (Saints) always write with the sentence “In my experience…”
5. Absence — This is about trying to perceive beyond our 5 senses, everything non-perception.
The materialists focus on External Perception. Buddhism prescribes perception and reasoning.
I figured recently that modern social sciences calls this Ontology & Epistemology.
Ontology is about getting answers for — ‘what is reality, what is existence’. The study is about what is true & real and the nature of it.Epistemology — How do we know the abstract & how to obtain it. So this is about the nature of knowledge and how to gain it.
The combination of these 2 gives us our paradigms, what we hold sacred to us. Some call it their belief systems. The Rishis left us not only with the knowledge but also the means to verify. The most important quality for absorbing philosophy is to “try before you buy”. Test, experiment before you accept.
@seenaveennarayanan — FB