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Collection: Part 10 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 10
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0:03–0:10Setting a debating hall in Mithila, on a low table beside Gangesha sit a smoking lamp,
0:10–0:15an unlit second lamp, and half in shadow a common clay jar.
0:16–0:19Prawl. Satradhara enters.
0:19–0:23Every builder tests his mortar before he trusts it with a wall.
0:23–0:28Gangesha Upadeya, before he would let logic carry the weight of a single conclusion,
0:28–0:34before he would let it prove that fire causes smoke, or that a maker stands behind the world,
0:34–0:40tested the mortar first, what, exactly, is a valid piece of knowledge. What, exactly,
0:40–0:46does it mean for one thing to be invariably tied to another? He would not move an inch until the
0:46–0:53definition itself could survive every attack he could throw at it, including his own. He tells
0:53–0:59us plainly in his own opening verses, who he built this fortress against, the Buddhist
0:59–1:05logicians of his day, who denied an unseen maker of the world as confidently as they denied an
1:05–1:12unseen self. Tonight one of them has come to test the fortress in person. Watch how Gangesha
1:12–1:17answers him, not by shouting loud up but by defining more precisely than a new opponent
1:17–1:22thought possible, and then more than once precisely enough to catch his own first
1:22–1:24Just attempt in the same net.
1:24–1:25Exit.
1:25–1:28Act 1.
1:28–1:30The Inattentive Scholar.
1:30–1:36Geoletawon E45GES acutor is seated, a lamp burning beside him.
1:36–1:43The MIMacron MA-Macron Letawon E43S aka and the border are both present.
1:43–1:48Every author who begins a work performs in a vocation, wishing the work to be completed,
1:48–1:49I have done the same tonight.
1:49–1:54Before I ask anyone in this hall to accept a harder claim, let me test the easiest one
1:54–1:57first to does an invocation actually cause anything at all.
1:57–2:01A fair place to start and I will not let you pass it cheaply.
2:01–2:04If invocation causes completion, the two should rise and fall together present when the work
2:04–2:06is finished absent when it fails.
2:06–2:11But I can name your scholar in this very tradition, Udayana himself, by report in
2:11–2:15an inattentive hour, who completed the Kurenevali without troubling to perform any invocation
2:15–2:16worth the name.
2:16–2:17There is your counter instance.
2:17–2:21The rule breaks in the very house that claims to have invented it.
2:21–2:23Keep that example closed, friend.
2:23–2:27Because I intend to use it against you before this act is finished.
2:27–2:31Not merely answer it, but let me first grant you the full force of your objection.
2:31–2:36Honestly stated, if a cause and its effect are truly bound, the effect should never
2:36–2:39appear without it, nor the cause without eventually producing it.
2:39–2:41Ye the orner's work was completed.
2:41–2:43Is in vocation.
2:43–2:45On your account was absent or careless.
2:45–2:50On the surface, you have shown a deviation, and deviation is fatal to any claim to causal
2:50–2:51law.
2:51–2:52Then you can see the point.
2:52–2:56I can see the appearance of the point, which is a different concession entirely.
2:56–3:02Consider what an invocation is actually said to produce, not the completion itself, directly,
3:02–3:06as though chanting a verse belayed bricks, but the removal of an obstacle that would
3:06–3:08otherwise have interrupted the work.
3:08–3:13A worldly task, once its obstacles are cleared, completes itself by worldly means skill,
3:13–3:18materials, sustained effort, now asked of your inattentive scholar was his work.
3:18–3:24On that particular day, ever actually obstructed, if no obstacle stood in his path to begin with,
3:24–3:29there was nothing for an invocation to remove, and its absence proves nothing at all.
3:29–3:33Aloxmith's absence does not deviate from the rule that locksmith's open locks on a day
3:33–3:35when no door happened to be locked.
3:35–3:37A convenient rescue.
3:37–3:41How would you ever know in advance whether an obstacle was lying in wait or not?
3:41–3:43You have made your causal law intestable.
3:43–3:47It now explains success and failure equally, which is another way of saying it explains
3:47–3:48nothing.
3:48–3:53Not intestable only, like most causal claims worth having, tied to a condition rather than
3:53–3:55announced as unconditional.
3:55–4:01Fire causes smoke only where the fuel is wet enough to smolder dry fuel burns clean, and
4:01–4:05no one calls that a deviation in the law connecting fire and smoke.
4:05–4:09You are asking me to abandon a rule because it is a condition attached when every rule
4:09–4:14either of us has ever relied on from the kitchen to this hall carries the same kind of condition.
4:14–4:21Then let me press you from my own side, Gengeshev, since the border, and I do not usually stand on
4:21–4:27the same ground. Grant that invocation removes obstacles rather than manufacturing completion
4:27–4:33directly. Still, how is that removal known, if not by the very Vedic injunction that first
4:33–4:38taught cultivated persons to perform it before an undertaking.
4:38–4:43Strip away scriptural authority, and your causal chain has no first link.
4:43–4:46I will not strip it away, I never propose to.
4:46–4:51Revelation tells us the general rule, ordinary observation of cultivated persons, generation
4:51–4:57after generation, performing this act before this kind of task, confirms that the rule
4:57–4:58is no idle poetry.
4:58–5:04The two agree, as I do hear, a cause may be trusted precisely as we trust any cause established
5:04–5:10by steady, repeated, unexplained by coincidence, correlation, the very method, border, that
5:10–5:14you yourself use every time you infer fire from smoke without demanding to see the fire
5:14–5:15directly.
5:15–5:17You have kept your promise, Akaria.
5:17–5:20You did use my own example against me in the end.
5:20–5:23And I will keep making that same promise all evening.
5:23–5:26I never asked you to accept an unseen cause on faith.
5:26–5:31I ask only that you extend to my unseen causes the same courtesy of inference you already extend,
5:31–5:34without a second thought, to your own.
5:35–5:38Act 2. The Shell that was never silver.
5:38–5:43A servant places a shell on the low table beside the jar.
5:43–5:48G a letter 1e45ge'-esecuted gestures toward it.
5:48–5:54Before we build anything further, we must agree what we mean by true cognition in the first place,
5:54–5:58not what is true, but what makes a cognition true as opposed to merely occurring.
5:58–6:03Here is my first attempt at cognition is valid when it presents a property exactly where
6:03–6:05the property actually exists.
6:05–6:07I see silver and silver is there, valid.
6:07–6:11I see silver in this shell, and silver is not there, invalid.
6:11–6:15That sounds almost too simple to need saying akara.
6:15–6:18Everything simple in this science has already survived and ambushed or it would not
6:18–6:20be standing here simple in front of you.
6:20–6:24Watch the Amish now take the confused cognition.
6:24–6:27Common enough I dust the shell is silver.
6:27–6:29Test my definition against it.
6:29–6:33Honestly, the shell component of the cognition, the bare this, is placed correctly since the
6:33–6:34shell truly is there.
6:34–6:38The silver component is placed wrongly since no silver is there.
6:38–6:43One cognition, one sentence, and yet my own definition is simultaneously valid in
6:43–6:46one half and invalid in the other.
6:46–6:49Is that not simply a contradiction in your definition?
6:49–6:54it would be, if a cognition were forced to be valid or indolent as one indivisible lump,
6:54–6:58but a cognition of the shell-silver is not one indivisible cling. It is two clings used
6:58–7:04by a single glance, one about this, one about silverness, and each half may be tested against
7:04–7:09the world separately, exactly as a sentence with two clauses may have one clause true
7:09–7:13and the other false without breaking the law of non-contradiction. My definition
7:13–7:19survives, once we are honest about what a compound cognition actually contains.
7:19–7:23Then extend the test one step further and see whether it survives me.
7:23–7:27A tree stands before us, conjunction with a bird sits at its crown, an absence of the
7:27–7:29same conjunction sits at its root.
7:29–7:34By your definition is the cognition this tree is conjunction valid or invalid.
7:34–7:38You have set the trap cleverly and I will walk into it on purpose because the way
7:38–7:44out is instructive, conjunction, and its absence do not occupy the whole tree indiscriminately.
7:44–7:49One occupies the crown, the other the route, and a cognition properly delimited by which
7:49–7:53part is being spoken of is neither vague nor self-contradicting, the tree.
7:53–7:57At its crown, its conjunction is true, the tree.
7:57–8:02At its route, laxity is equally true, only a cognition that refused to specify a part
8:02–8:07would deserve your accusation, and no careful speaker leaves a cognition so undressed.
8:07–8:12You are adding conditions to your definition faster than I can raise objections to it.
8:12–8:16At what point does a definition patch this many times stop being a definition and become
8:16–8:18a confession that the first attempt failed?
8:18–8:22When a physician adjusts a splint twice before the bone sets straight, we do not say the
8:22–8:23splint failed.
8:23–8:27We say the physician was honest about the first attempt and skilled enough to correct
8:27–8:30a before trusting a patient's full weight to it.
8:30–8:34I would rather hand you a definition with three patches, each of which has survived
8:34–8:35your best blow.
8:35–8:39a single, elegant sentence that shatters the moment you lean on it.
8:39–8:42Test it once more if you have another blow in you.
8:42–8:44One more, then, and it is the sharpest I have.
8:44–8:48A pot freshly made was black before firing and is red after.
8:48–8:52This pot is black was once true and is now false, the very same sentence about the very
8:52–8:57same pot changing its truth with nothing in your definition to explain why.
8:57–9:02Because my definition was never a claim about sentences floating free of time, it was
9:02–9:03from the start.
9:03–9:09a claim about a property residing in a substrate at a given time, exactly as it resides in a given part.
9:09–9:14The pot, before firing, was black remains true forever, unchanged by the kiln.
9:15–9:20This pot, now, is black was always a different clean, tied to a different moment,
9:20–9:24and is no defect in a rule that it answers a time index question with a time indexed answer.
9:24–9:29The kiln did not break my definition. It only proved that whoever forgets to specify,
9:29–9:33We must never speak carefully enough to test it in the first place.
9:33–9:36I begin to see why this book took a lifetime to write.
9:36–9:41It took a lifetime because every sentence in it is already set across from an opponent exactly
9:41–9:45as sharp as the one sitting across from me tonight that is not a complaint
9:45–9:49friend that is the only kind of sentence worth building anything further upon.
9:51–9:54Act 3 The bond between smoke and fire
9:54–10:03The lamp beside G1E45GESecuiter is trimmed. Smoke curls faintly from its wick.
10:03–10:08We are ready now for the engine of every inference. Either of us will ever make the bond called
10:08–10:14viatti. The invariable tie between a mark such as smoke and what it proves such as fire. Without a
10:14–10:20precise account of that tie, smoke therefore fire is a habit, not a proof. Here is the first attempt
10:20–10:24to the tie-holes when the mark never appears with a thing to be proven as absent.
10:24–10:26Simple, and I think already broken.
10:26–10:31Consider a purely affirmative claim with no counter-instance available anywhere to test.
10:31–10:34This is nameable because it is noble.
10:34–10:36Everything noble happens also to be nameable.
10:36–10:40There exists no case anywhere of noble but a nameable in which you're never occurs
10:40–10:42where absent could even be checked.
10:42–10:46Your definition asks me to search a field that has no far corner to search.
10:46–10:49You have found a genuine depth and I will not paper over it.
10:49–10:54I abandon the first attempt outright here in front of this hall, exactly as readily as I
10:54–11:00abandon my first definition of valid cognition and acti-dote. Let me try again the tie holds when
11:00–11:05the mark's own locus is never distinct from the locus of what it proves. No better, restate it
11:05–11:10in terms of smoke and fire occurring in different places, and the same gap reappears wherever
11:10–11:16no such different place can even be imagined to test it against. Correct again, and here
11:16–11:21Here is a third attempt and a fourth, each closing ador the last one left open, until
11:21–11:26we reach the one I am prepared to defend against every blow you have already landed, and every
11:26–11:30one you have not yet thought to try the tie is collocation itself, the mark residing
11:30–11:35together with what it proves in such a way that the mark's own presence is never found
11:35–11:39in a place determined, however, indirectly by the troop, in complete absence of what
11:39–11:40it proves.
11:40–11:42Test the Mount Nile.
11:42–11:43Smoke rises from it.
11:43–11:45Fire.
11:45–11:50on it is co-located with a very smoked nowhere is there an absence of firing general standing
11:50–11:56in the same place as the particular smoke the tide holds, stated with no gap left for
11:56–11:58corner or case to hide in.
11:58–12:01You have built four definitions to survive one example.
12:01–12:03Forgive me if I am not yet dozzled.
12:03–12:05Bedazzled by the method not to count.
12:05–12:08Notice what I did not do at any point in these four attempts.
12:08–12:12I did not simply assert my conclusion and dare you to disprove it.
12:12–12:18I built the weakest version of my own claim first, on purpose, and let you, or twice, let
12:18–12:21myself break it before a stronger version was proposed.
12:21–12:26A wall tested four times by its own mason, and left standing is worth more than a wall
12:26–12:28no one has yet thought to push.
12:28–12:33But Akaria, how do we ever come to know such a tie in the first place once it is properly
12:33–12:34defined?
12:34–12:35I have seen smoke and fire together in a kitchen.
12:35–12:38I have not seen every fire in the world."
12:38–12:43repeated observation, joined to the failure of any single case, however hard-sought, to
12:43–12:48break the pattern, and where repetition alone leaves a shadow of doubt, by further support
12:48–12:53your boozed friend himself half-ranse without noticing a smoke could truly arise apart from
12:53–12:56fire, then smokes very dependence on fire.
12:56–13:02The fact that smoldering fuel, and only smoldering fuel, sends up the particular gray column
13:02–13:08would be an unexplained coincidence repeating itself in every kitchen, on every mountain,
13:08–13:14in every age, with no exception ever once observed by anyone, a coincidence that never fails is
13:14–13:19no longer usefully called a coincidence. It has earned a harder name alor.
13:19–13:22Act 4 An Agent Behind the Clay
13:22–13:31G the Latawani 45G E-Esecutor lifts the jar from the table and sets it before the assembly.
13:31–13:34Every argument this evening has been sharpening a single tool.
13:34–13:36Now I put the tool to its hardest use.
13:36–13:42Earth and the other elements of this world are effects produced, or risen, not eternal
13:42–13:44exactly as this juror is in effect.
13:44–13:46Nothing produced lacks a producer.
13:46–13:51Therefore Earth and the other elements of a major precisely as this juror has a potter.
13:51–13:55Before I attack the arguments, Bodh, I will attack at skeleton and I promise you this
13:55–13:58is not a invasion, it is the same discipline you demanded of me all evening.
13:58–14:01What precisely is the subject of this inference?
14:01–14:05You cannot simply say earth and the other elements because no single word denotes each of them
14:05–14:11individually and no single recurring feature unites them into one collective subject either.
14:11–14:15Name your subject precisely in your own idiom or the inference has nowhere to stand before
14:15–14:16it has even begun.
14:16–14:21A demand I would have made of you had our positions been reversed and I answer it in
14:21–14:24kind rather than waiting it aside.
14:24–14:28Let the subject be whatever is in effect and is not already known by both of us to
14:28–14:33be produced by an embodied human agent that excludes the jar, which we both already agree
14:33–14:38was made by a potter, and it excludes nothing that remains genuinely indiscute between us.
14:39–14:44Too narrow and dangerously so. On that phrasing, a sprout produced certainly yet by no embodied
14:44–14:49craftsman either falls inside your subject as readily as earth does. Prove your conclusion
14:49–14:53for the sprout instead quietly, and you have proven something, but you have not proven the
14:53–14:58maker of worlds. You have only smuggled a small, unremarkable case into the same door and called
14:58–14:59at the same victory.
14:59–15:04A precise objection, and I will not answer it by softening the subject further, which
15:04–15:06is the tempting mistake.
15:06–15:09I will answer it by refusing to let the sprout stand in for earth at all.
15:09–15:13The sprout was never the disputed topic between us tonight.
15:13–15:18Earth was, in inference, proves its conclusion, only for the subject actually named and its
15:18–15:19outset.
15:19–15:23And if I quietly substitute a sprout partway through, I would have committed the very
15:23–15:28fault I spent an act, though accusing you of hiding inside a definition, changing the
15:28–15:34ground beneath an argument once it grew inconvenient. The subject remains barefoot, water, fire,
15:34–15:40air, taken. As the genuinely disputed effects they are, the sprout may wait its own evening.
15:40–15:43Then narrow it correctly yourself since you reject my narrowing.
15:43–15:48Say plainly, agency here means being produced by someone possessing direct knowledge of
15:48–15:52the material cause desired to act an effort. The very three things a potter has standing
15:52–15:57before his wheel. I very nearly said exactly that a moment ago, and I am glad you forced
15:57–16:03me to test it before I leaned on it. Because it collapses under its own weight, you and I'd
16:03–16:08both already possessed knowledge, desire, an effort concerning countless material causes
16:08–16:12every single day, and yet earth as a whole is plainly not produced by either of us on
16:12–16:16the strength of that ordinary knowledge and desire alone. If agency meant nothing
16:16–16:21more than the bare presence of those three faculties, in some person or other, the
16:21–16:26property would already be satisfied a thousand times over by ordinary living beings. In my inference,
16:26–16:29would prove nothing it did not already have to assume.
16:29–16:33Then you have refuted your own proof faster than I could have managed it myself tonight.
16:33–16:37I have refuted my own careless proof, which is a different achievement
16:37–16:42than refuting the proof itself. And it is exactly the achievement this entire evening has
16:42–16:47been training the Hall to recognize as progress rather than defeat, what the argument actually
16:47–16:52requires is narrower still an agent whose knowledge, desire, and effort were not merely
16:52–16:56present alongside the production of earth as mine happened to be present alongside the
16:56–17:00fouled in things I never caused, but were the effective cause of it, standing in the
17:00–17:06same causal relation to earth that the potter's knowledge, desire, and effort stand to this
17:06–17:07jaw.
17:07–17:10And not merely keeping the same company as earth's production the way an idle bicep
17:10–17:13interkeeps company with a fire he did not light.
17:13–17:17And can that narrower agency be found among us, Akaria, some embodied person however
17:17–17:22hidden who might satisfy it after all. Test it honestly and see where it leads
17:22–17:28an embodied agent's effort. Presupposes a body, a body. On every account either of us accepts.
17:28–17:34Is itself among the produced things requiring exactly this kind of maker? To explain Earth
17:34–17:39by appeal to some earlier embodied agent is to borrow against a death that was never paid.
17:39–17:44Every candidate you offer me from within the world of bodies turns out to owe its own existence
17:44–17:49to the very kind of cause we are trying to locate. The Ching cannot terminate in an embodied
17:49–17:54maker without either running back forever, unexplained, or stopping at last at a knower,
17:54–17:59a willer, and an actor whose effort does not itself depend on a body already owed to some
17:59–18:04further maker. That is the whole of what I mean by God and no more not a larger man,
18:04–18:08but the one linked in the Ching of Makers who does not himself require prior maker to be there
18:08–18:13at all. You have spent an entire evening refusing to let either of us take a shortcut,
18:13–18:17not through my objections, and twice tonight, not through your own first answers either.
18:17–18:22I do not yet call myself persuaded, but I no longer believe, as I did when I sat down,
18:22–18:26that this conclusion was reached by skipping a single step available to skip.
18:26–18:31That is the only outcome I have ever asked this hall for. I did not come here tonight to win an
18:31–18:36argument by speaking last. I came to build one sentence at a time, in front of witnesses sharp
18:36–18:41enough to catch me if any single stone in the wall was set carelessly. If the wall stands,
18:41–18:46It will not be because I raised my voice at the end. It will be because nothing in it was left
18:46–18:49and tested by the time the lamp burned down.
18:50–18:57Epilogue. Saturdhara returns as the lamp is lowered. Notice what this evening was not.
18:57–19:03It was not louder than the debates that came before it in other halls, on other nights,
19:03–19:08over other books. Gangesha Upadile's whole method was the opposite of volume,
19:08–19:13State the claim as weakly and precisely as honesty allows.
19:13–19:18Invite the sharpest blow available, and if the blow lands, thank the opponent and rebuild
19:18–19:21rather than bluster past the wound.
19:21–19:26He called his book a wishful-filling jewel, and told us plainly in its own first lines
19:26–19:29whose darkness he meant it to clear.
19:29–19:36The powerful doubt of the Buddhist logicians of his age, who granted no unseen cause behind
19:36–19:41anything, neither an invocation's power nor a world's maker. He did not answer that
19:41–19:48doubt by refusing to feel its weight. He answered it by insisting four times over in one evening
19:48–19:55alone, that his own first answer had not yet earned the right to stand unchallenged. Whether
19:55–20:00that is the same thing as being right, this all leaves, as it always does, to the one
20:00–20:03who carries the question out the door.
20:03–20:05exhumed omnis.

Plain text

Setting a debating hall in Mithila, on a low table beside Gangesha sit a smoking lamp, an unlit second lamp, and half in shadow a common clay jar. Prawl. Satradhara enters. Every builder tests his mortar before he trusts it with a wall. Gangesha Upadeya, before he would let logic carry the weight of a single conclusion, before he would let it prove that fire causes smoke, or that a maker stands behind the world, tested the mortar first, what, exactly, is a valid piece of knowledge. What, exactly, does it mean for one thing to be invariably tied to another? He would not move an inch until the definition itself could survive every attack he could throw at it, including his own. He tells us plainly in his own opening verses, who he built this fortress against, the Buddhist logicians of his day, who denied an unseen maker of the world as confidently as they denied an unseen self. Tonight one of them has come to test the fortress in person. Watch how Gangesha answers him, not by shouting loud up but by defining more precisely than a new opponent thought possible, and then more than once precisely enough to catch his own first Just attempt in the same net. Exit. Act 1. The Inattentive Scholar. Geoletawon E45GES acutor is seated, a lamp burning beside him. The MIMacron MA-Macron Letawon E43S aka and the border are both present. Every author who begins a work performs in a vocation, wishing the work to be completed, I have done the same tonight. Before I ask anyone in this hall to accept a harder claim, let me test the easiest one first to does an invocation actually cause anything at all. A fair place to start and I will not let you pass it cheaply. If invocation causes completion, the two should rise and fall together present when the work is finished absent when it fails. But I can name your scholar in this very tradition, Udayana himself, by report in an inattentive hour, who completed the Kurenevali without troubling to perform any invocation worth the name. There is your counter instance. The rule breaks in the very house that claims to have invented it. Keep that example closed, friend. Because I intend to use it against you before this act is finished. Not merely answer it, but let me first grant you the full force of your objection. Honestly stated, if a cause and its effect are truly bound, the effect should never appear without it, nor the cause without eventually producing it. Ye the orner's work was completed. Is in vocation. On your account was absent or careless. On the surface, you have shown a deviation, and deviation is fatal to any claim to causal law. Then you can see the point. I can see the appearance of the point, which is a different concession entirely. Consider what an invocation is actually said to produce, not the completion itself, directly, as though chanting a verse belayed bricks, but the removal of an obstacle that would otherwise have interrupted the work. A worldly task, once its obstacles are cleared, completes itself by worldly means skill, materials, sustained effort, now asked of your inattentive scholar was his work. On that particular day, ever actually obstructed, if no obstacle stood in his path to begin with, there was nothing for an invocation to remove, and its absence proves nothing at all. Aloxmith's absence does not deviate from the rule that locksmith's open locks on a day when no door happened to be locked. A convenient rescue. How would you ever know in advance whether an obstacle was lying in wait or not? You have made your causal law intestable. It now explains success and failure equally, which is another way of saying it explains nothing. Not intestable only, like most causal claims worth having, tied to a condition rather than announced as unconditional. Fire causes smoke only where the fuel is wet enough to smolder dry fuel burns clean, and no one calls that a deviation in the law connecting fire and smoke. You are asking me to abandon a rule because it is a condition attached when every rule either of us has ever relied on from the kitchen to this hall carries the same kind of condition. Then let me press you from my own side, Gengeshev, since the border, and I do not usually stand on the same ground. Grant that invocation removes obstacles rather than manufacturing completion directly. Still, how is that removal known, if not by the very Vedic injunction that first taught cultivated persons to perform it before an undertaking. Strip away scriptural authority, and your causal chain has no first link. I will not strip it away, I never propose to. Revelation tells us the general rule, ordinary observation of cultivated persons, generation after generation, performing this act before this kind of task, confirms that the rule is no idle poetry. The two agree, as I do hear, a cause may be trusted precisely as we trust any cause established by steady, repeated, unexplained by coincidence, correlation, the very method, border, that you yourself use every time you infer fire from smoke without demanding to see the fire directly. You have kept your promise, Akaria. You did use my own example against me in the end. And I will keep making that same promise all evening. I never asked you to accept an unseen cause on faith. I ask only that you extend to my unseen causes the same courtesy of inference you already extend, without a second thought, to your own. Act 2. The Shell that was never silver. A servant places a shell on the low table beside the jar. G a letter 1e45ge'-esecuted gestures toward it. Before we build anything further, we must agree what we mean by true cognition in the first place, not what is true, but what makes a cognition true as opposed to merely occurring. Here is my first attempt at cognition is valid when it presents a property exactly where the property actually exists. I see silver and silver is there, valid. I see silver in this shell, and silver is not there, invalid. That sounds almost too simple to need saying akara. Everything simple in this science has already survived and ambushed or it would not be standing here simple in front of you. Watch the Amish now take the confused cognition. Common enough I dust the shell is silver. Test my definition against it. Honestly, the shell component of the cognition, the bare this, is placed correctly since the shell truly is there. The silver component is placed wrongly since no silver is there. One cognition, one sentence, and yet my own definition is simultaneously valid in one half and invalid in the other. Is that not simply a contradiction in your definition? it would be, if a cognition were forced to be valid or indolent as one indivisible lump, but a cognition of the shell-silver is not one indivisible cling. It is two clings used by a single glance, one about this, one about silverness, and each half may be tested against the world separately, exactly as a sentence with two clauses may have one clause true and the other false without breaking the law of non-contradiction. My definition survives, once we are honest about what a compound cognition actually contains. Then extend the test one step further and see whether it survives me. A tree stands before us, conjunction with a bird sits at its crown, an absence of the same conjunction sits at its root. By your definition is the cognition this tree is conjunction valid or invalid. You have set the trap cleverly and I will walk into it on purpose because the way out is instructive, conjunction, and its absence do not occupy the whole tree indiscriminately. One occupies the crown, the other the route, and a cognition properly delimited by which part is being spoken of is neither vague nor self-contradicting, the tree. At its crown, its conjunction is true, the tree. At its route, laxity is equally true, only a cognition that refused to specify a part would deserve your accusation, and no careful speaker leaves a cognition so undressed. You are adding conditions to your definition faster than I can raise objections to it. At what point does a definition patch this many times stop being a definition and become a confession that the first attempt failed? When a physician adjusts a splint twice before the bone sets straight, we do not say the splint failed. We say the physician was honest about the first attempt and skilled enough to correct a before trusting a patient's full weight to it. I would rather hand you a definition with three patches, each of which has survived your best blow. a single, elegant sentence that shatters the moment you lean on it. Test it once more if you have another blow in you. One more, then, and it is the sharpest I have. A pot freshly made was black before firing and is red after. This pot is black was once true and is now false, the very same sentence about the very same pot changing its truth with nothing in your definition to explain why. Because my definition was never a claim about sentences floating free of time, it was from the start. a claim about a property residing in a substrate at a given time, exactly as it resides in a given part. The pot, before firing, was black remains true forever, unchanged by the kiln. This pot, now, is black was always a different clean, tied to a different moment, and is no defect in a rule that it answers a time index question with a time indexed answer. The kiln did not break my definition. It only proved that whoever forgets to specify, We must never speak carefully enough to test it in the first place. I begin to see why this book took a lifetime to write. It took a lifetime because every sentence in it is already set across from an opponent exactly as sharp as the one sitting across from me tonight that is not a complaint friend that is the only kind of sentence worth building anything further upon. Act 3 The bond between smoke and fire The lamp beside G1E45GESecuiter is trimmed. Smoke curls faintly from its wick. We are ready now for the engine of every inference. Either of us will ever make the bond called viatti. The invariable tie between a mark such as smoke and what it proves such as fire. Without a precise account of that tie, smoke therefore fire is a habit, not a proof. Here is the first attempt to the tie-holes when the mark never appears with a thing to be proven as absent. Simple, and I think already broken. Consider a purely affirmative claim with no counter-instance available anywhere to test. This is nameable because it is noble. Everything noble happens also to be nameable. There exists no case anywhere of noble but a nameable in which you're never occurs where absent could even be checked. Your definition asks me to search a field that has no far corner to search. You have found a genuine depth and I will not paper over it. I abandon the first attempt outright here in front of this hall, exactly as readily as I abandon my first definition of valid cognition and acti-dote. Let me try again the tie holds when the mark's own locus is never distinct from the locus of what it proves. No better, restate it in terms of smoke and fire occurring in different places, and the same gap reappears wherever no such different place can even be imagined to test it against. Correct again, and here Here is a third attempt and a fourth, each closing ador the last one left open, until we reach the one I am prepared to defend against every blow you have already landed, and every one you have not yet thought to try the tie is collocation itself, the mark residing together with what it proves in such a way that the mark's own presence is never found in a place determined, however, indirectly by the troop, in complete absence of what it proves. Test the Mount Nile. Smoke rises from it. Fire. on it is co-located with a very smoked nowhere is there an absence of firing general standing in the same place as the particular smoke the tide holds, stated with no gap left for corner or case to hide in. You have built four definitions to survive one example. Forgive me if I am not yet dozzled. Bedazzled by the method not to count. Notice what I did not do at any point in these four attempts. I did not simply assert my conclusion and dare you to disprove it. I built the weakest version of my own claim first, on purpose, and let you, or twice, let myself break it before a stronger version was proposed. A wall tested four times by its own mason, and left standing is worth more than a wall no one has yet thought to push. But Akaria, how do we ever come to know such a tie in the first place once it is properly defined? I have seen smoke and fire together in a kitchen. I have not seen every fire in the world." repeated observation, joined to the failure of any single case, however hard-sought, to break the pattern, and where repetition alone leaves a shadow of doubt, by further support your boozed friend himself half-ranse without noticing a smoke could truly arise apart from fire, then smokes very dependence on fire. The fact that smoldering fuel, and only smoldering fuel, sends up the particular gray column would be an unexplained coincidence repeating itself in every kitchen, on every mountain, in every age, with no exception ever once observed by anyone, a coincidence that never fails is no longer usefully called a coincidence. It has earned a harder name alor. Act 4 An Agent Behind the Clay G the Latawani 45G E-Esecutor lifts the jar from the table and sets it before the assembly. Every argument this evening has been sharpening a single tool. Now I put the tool to its hardest use. Earth and the other elements of this world are effects produced, or risen, not eternal exactly as this juror is in effect. Nothing produced lacks a producer. Therefore Earth and the other elements of a major precisely as this juror has a potter. Before I attack the arguments, Bodh, I will attack at skeleton and I promise you this is not a invasion, it is the same discipline you demanded of me all evening. What precisely is the subject of this inference? You cannot simply say earth and the other elements because no single word denotes each of them individually and no single recurring feature unites them into one collective subject either. Name your subject precisely in your own idiom or the inference has nowhere to stand before it has even begun. A demand I would have made of you had our positions been reversed and I answer it in kind rather than waiting it aside. Let the subject be whatever is in effect and is not already known by both of us to be produced by an embodied human agent that excludes the jar, which we both already agree was made by a potter, and it excludes nothing that remains genuinely indiscute between us. Too narrow and dangerously so. On that phrasing, a sprout produced certainly yet by no embodied craftsman either falls inside your subject as readily as earth does. Prove your conclusion for the sprout instead quietly, and you have proven something, but you have not proven the maker of worlds. You have only smuggled a small, unremarkable case into the same door and called at the same victory. A precise objection, and I will not answer it by softening the subject further, which is the tempting mistake. I will answer it by refusing to let the sprout stand in for earth at all. The sprout was never the disputed topic between us tonight. Earth was, in inference, proves its conclusion, only for the subject actually named and its outset. And if I quietly substitute a sprout partway through, I would have committed the very fault I spent an act, though accusing you of hiding inside a definition, changing the ground beneath an argument once it grew inconvenient. The subject remains barefoot, water, fire, air, taken. As the genuinely disputed effects they are, the sprout may wait its own evening. Then narrow it correctly yourself since you reject my narrowing. Say plainly, agency here means being produced by someone possessing direct knowledge of the material cause desired to act an effort. The very three things a potter has standing before his wheel. I very nearly said exactly that a moment ago, and I am glad you forced me to test it before I leaned on it. Because it collapses under its own weight, you and I'd both already possessed knowledge, desire, an effort concerning countless material causes every single day, and yet earth as a whole is plainly not produced by either of us on the strength of that ordinary knowledge and desire alone. If agency meant nothing more than the bare presence of those three faculties, in some person or other, the property would already be satisfied a thousand times over by ordinary living beings. In my inference, would prove nothing it did not already have to assume. Then you have refuted your own proof faster than I could have managed it myself tonight. I have refuted my own careless proof, which is a different achievement than refuting the proof itself. And it is exactly the achievement this entire evening has been training the Hall to recognize as progress rather than defeat, what the argument actually requires is narrower still an agent whose knowledge, desire, and effort were not merely present alongside the production of earth as mine happened to be present alongside the fouled in things I never caused, but were the effective cause of it, standing in the same causal relation to earth that the potter's knowledge, desire, and effort stand to this jaw. And not merely keeping the same company as earth's production the way an idle bicep interkeeps company with a fire he did not light. And can that narrower agency be found among us, Akaria, some embodied person however hidden who might satisfy it after all. Test it honestly and see where it leads an embodied agent's effort. Presupposes a body, a body. On every account either of us accepts. Is itself among the produced things requiring exactly this kind of maker? To explain Earth by appeal to some earlier embodied agent is to borrow against a death that was never paid. Every candidate you offer me from within the world of bodies turns out to owe its own existence to the very kind of cause we are trying to locate. The Ching cannot terminate in an embodied maker without either running back forever, unexplained, or stopping at last at a knower, a willer, and an actor whose effort does not itself depend on a body already owed to some further maker. That is the whole of what I mean by God and no more not a larger man, but the one linked in the Ching of Makers who does not himself require prior maker to be there at all. You have spent an entire evening refusing to let either of us take a shortcut, not through my objections, and twice tonight, not through your own first answers either. I do not yet call myself persuaded, but I no longer believe, as I did when I sat down, that this conclusion was reached by skipping a single step available to skip. That is the only outcome I have ever asked this hall for. I did not come here tonight to win an argument by speaking last. I came to build one sentence at a time, in front of witnesses sharp enough to catch me if any single stone in the wall was set carelessly. If the wall stands, It will not be because I raised my voice at the end. It will be because nothing in it was left and tested by the time the lamp burned down. Epilogue. Saturdhara returns as the lamp is lowered. Notice what this evening was not. It was not louder than the debates that came before it in other halls, on other nights, over other books. Gangesha Upadile's whole method was the opposite of volume, State the claim as weakly and precisely as honesty allows. Invite the sharpest blow available, and if the blow lands, thank the opponent and rebuild rather than bluster past the wound. He called his book a wishful-filling jewel, and told us plainly in its own first lines whose darkness he meant it to clear. The powerful doubt of the Buddhist logicians of his age, who granted no unseen cause behind anything, neither an invocation's power nor a world's maker. He did not answer that doubt by refusing to feel its weight. He answered it by insisting four times over in one evening alone, that his own first answer had not yet earned the right to stand unchallenged. Whether that is the same thing as being right, this all leaves, as it always does, to the one who carries the question out the door. exhumed omnis.

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