The second lesson is quite different and more striking. Buddhist thought, and Asian thought in general, has often been written off by Western philosophers. How can contradictions be true? What’s all this talk of ineffability? This is all nonsense. The constructions I have described show how to make precise mathematical sense of the Buddhist views. This does not, of course, show that they are true. That’s a different matter. But it does show that these ideas can be made as logically rigorous and coherent as ideas can be. As the Buddha may or may not have said (or both, or neither): ‘There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting.’
Fun stuff. Also, the post I wrote on Nagarjuna’s tetralemma is one of the most popular ones I’ve done; I still get visitors to it on an almost-daily basis. Some people use the Internet for something besides gossip and drama, I guess.
May 6, 2014 @ 3:12 pm
"…a sensible system for databases that might have been fed inconsistent or incomplete information." Indeed.