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Collection: Part 11 · VIDEHA MITHILA MAITHILI DISCUSSION CRITICISM SERIES PART 11
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0:07–0:14SETTING A DEBATING HALL IN Mithila, on a low table beside Gangesha, sit a smoking lamp,
0:14–0:20an unlit second lamp, and half in shadow, a common clay jar. SUTRADHARA ENTERS
0:20–0:29Every 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,
0:29–0:35before he would let it prove that fire causes smoke, all that a maker stands behind the world,
0:35–0:41tested the mortar first, what, exactly, is a valid piece of knowledge. What, exactly,
0:41–0:48does it mean for one thing to be invariably tied to another? He would not move an inch until the
0:48–0:54definition itself could survive every attack he could throw at it, including his own. He tells
0:54–1:00us plainly, in his own opening verses, who he built this fortress against, the Buddhist
1:00–1:06logicians of his day, who denied an unseen maker of the world as confidently as they
1:06–1:12denied an unseen self. Tonight, one of them has come to test the fortress in person. Watch
1:12–1:18how Gangesha answers him, not by shouting loud up but by defining more precisely than a new
1:18–1:23opponent thought possible, and then, more than once, precisely enough to catch his own
1:23–1:32first attempt in the same net. Act 1. The Inattentive Scholar. G. Alettooni, 4.5. G. E. S. Acutea is
1:32–1:39seated. A lamp burning beside him. The M. I. Macron, M. A. Macron, Lettooni, 4.3. S. Acaya and the
1:39–1:45border are both present. Every author who begins a work performs an evocation, wishing the work
1:45–1:50to be completed. I have done the same tonight. Before I ask anyone in this hall to accept a
1:50–1:55harder claim, let me test the easiest one first to does an invocation actually cause anything at all.
1:55–1:59A fair place to start and I will not let you pass it cheaply.
1:59–2:03If invocation causes completion, the two should rise and fall together present when the work is
2:03–2:07finished absent when it fails. But I can name your scholar in this very tradition,
2:07–2:11Udayana himself, by report in an inattentive hour, who completed the Kuran evali without
2:11–2:15troubling to perform any invocation worth the name. There is your counter instance.
2:15–2:19The rule breaks in the very house that claims to have invented it.
2:19–2:25Keep that example close, friend, because I intend to use it against you before this act is finished.
2:25–2:29Not merely answer it, but let me first grant you the full force of your objection.
2:29–2:35Honestly stated, if a cause and its effect are truly bound, the effect should never appear without it,
2:35–2:39nor the cause without eventually producing it. You, the Orner's work was completed.
2:39–2:45Is in vocation. On your account was absent or careless. On the surface, you have shown
2:45–2:49Shoma deviation and deviation is fatal to any claim to causal law.
2:49–2:50Then you can see the point.
2:50–2:54I can see the appearance of the point, which is a different concession entirely.
2:54–2:59Consider what an invocation is actually said to produce, not the completion itself directly,
2:59–3:03as though chanting a verse could lay bricks, but the removal of an obstacle that would
3:03–3:05otherwise have interrupted the work.
3:05–3:10A worldly task, once its obstacles are cleared, completes itself by worldly means
3:10–3:13skill, materials, sustained effort.
3:13–3:16Now ask of your inattentive scholar was his work.
3:16–3:21On that particular day, ever actually obstructed, if no obstacle stood in his path to begin
3:21–3:25with, there was nothing for an invocation to remove, and its absence proves nothing at
3:25–3:26all.
3:26–3:30Aloxmith's absence does not deviate from the rule that Loxmith's open locks on a day
3:30–3:33when no door happened to be locked.
3:33–3:34A convenient rescue.
3:34–3:38How would you ever know in advance whether an obstacle was lying in wait or not?
3:38–3:40You have made your causal law intestable.
3:40–3:45now explains success and failure equally, which is another way of saying it explains nothing.
3:45–3:50Not intestable, only, like most causal claims worth having, tied to a condition rather than
3:50–3:52announced as unconditional.
3:52–3:58Fire causes smoke only where the fuel is wet enough to smolder dry fuel burns clean,
3:58–4:02and no one calls that a deviation in the law connecting fire and smoke.
4:02–4:06You are asking me to abandon a rule because it is a condition attached when every rule
4:06–4:12either of us has ever relied on from the kitchen to this hall carries the same kind of condition.
4:12–4:18Then let me press you from my own side, Gengeshev, since the border, and I do not usually stand on
4:18–4:24the same ground. Grant that invocation removes obstacles rather than manufacturing completion
4:24–4:30directly. Still, how is that removal known, if not by the very Vedic injunction that first
4:30–4:37taught cultivated persons to perform it before an undertaking. Strip away scriptural authority
4:37–4:40and your causal chain has no first link.
4:40–4:45I will not strip it away. I never proposed to. Revelation tells us the general rule,
4:45–4:50ordinary observation of cultivated persons, generation after generation, performing this
4:50–4:56act before this kind of task, confirms that the rule is no idle poetry. Whether to agree,
4:56–5:01As I do hear, a cause may be trusted precisely as we trust any cause established by steady,
5:01–5:07repeated, unexplained by coincidence, correlation, the very method, border, that you yourself
5:07–5:12use every time you infer fire from smoke without demanding to see the fire directly.
5:12–5:14You have kept your promise, Ikaria.
5:14–5:16You did use my own example against me in the end.
5:16–5:19And I will keep making that same promise all evening.
5:19–5:22I never asked you to accept an unseen cause on faith.
5:22–5:27I ask only that you extend to my unseen causes the same courtesy of inference you already
5:27–5:30extend without a second thought to your own.
5:30–5:36Act 2 The Shell That Was Never Silver A servant places a shell on the low table beside the
5:36–5:37jar.
5:37–5:42G a letter one e four five g e a executor gestures toward it.
5:42–5:47For we build anything further we must agree what we mean by true cognition in the first
5:47–5:53place, not what is true, but what makes a cognition true, as opposed to merely occurring.
5:53–5:57Here is my first attempt at cognition is valid, when it presents a property exactly where
5:57–5:59the property actually exists.
5:59–6:02I see silver, and silver is there, valid.
6:02–6:05I see silver in this shell, and silver is not there, invalid.
6:05–6:09That sounds almost too simple to need saying Akara.
6:09–6:12Everything simple in this science has already survived an ambush, or it would not be
6:12–6:14standing here simple in front of you.
6:14–6:18Watch the Ambitious Nile take the confused cognition.
6:18–6:21Common enough I dust the shell of silver.
6:21–6:23Test my definition against it.
6:23–6:27Honestly, the shell component of the cognition, the bare this, is placed correctly since the
6:27–6:28shell truly is there.
6:28–6:32The silver component is placed wrongly since no silver is there.
6:32–6:37One cognition, one sentence, and yet my own definition is simultaneously valid in one
6:37–6:39half and invalid in the other.
6:39–6:42Is that not simply a contradiction in your definition?
6:42–6:43It would be.
6:43–6:48cognition were forced to be valid or invalid as one indivisible lump, but a cognition of
6:48–6:53the shell silver is not one indivisible cling. It has two clings used by a single glance.
6:53–6:59One about this, one about silverness, and each half may be tested against the world separately,
6:59–7:04exactly as a sentence with two clauses may have one clause true and the other false
7:04–7:09without breaking the law of non-contradiction. My definition survives. Once we are honest
7:09–7:12about what a compound cognition actually contains.
7:12–7:16Next then the test one step further and see whether it survives me.
7:16–7:20A tree stands before us conjunction with a bird sits at its crown, an absence of the same
7:20–7:23conjunction sits at its root.
7:23–7:27By your definition is the cognition this tree is conjunction valid or invalid?
7:27–7:31You have set the trap cleverly and I will walk into it on purpose because the way
7:31–7:37out is instructive, conjunction and its absence do not occupy the whole tree indiscriminately.
7:37–7:42One occupies the crown, the other the route and a cognition properly delimited by which
7:42–7:47part is being spoken of is neither vague nor self-contradicting, the tree. At its crown,
7:47–7:53S conjunction is true, the tree. At its route, lax it is equally true, only a cognition that
7:53–7:58refused to specify a part would deserve your accusation, and no careful speaker leaves a
7:58–8:03cognition so undressed. You are adding conditions to your definition faster than I can raise
8:03–8:08objections to it. At what point does a definition patch this many times stop being a definition
8:08–8:10and become a confession that the first attempt failed.
8:10–8:14When a physician adjusts a splint twice before the bone sets straight,
8:14–8:19we do not say the splint failed. We say the physician was honest about the first attempt
8:19–8:22and skilled enough to correct a before trusting a patient's full weight to it.
8:22–8:27I would rather hand you a definition with three patches, each of which has survived your best blow,
8:27–8:31than a single elegant sentence that shatters the moment you lean on it.
8:31–8:34Test it once more if you have another blow in you.
8:34–8:39One more then, and it is the sharpest I have. A pot freshly made was black before firing and is
8:39–8:44read after. This pot is black was once true and is now false, the very same sentence about the very
8:44–8:49same pot changing its truth with nothing in your definition to explain why.
8:49–8:54Because my definition was never a claim about sentences floating free of time, it was from the
8:54–9:00start. A claim about a property reciting in a substrate at a given time, exactly as it recides
9:00–9:06in a given part. The pot before firing was black remains true forever, unchanged by the kiln.
9:07–9:11This pot now is black was always a different clean, tied to a different moment,
9:11–9:16and it is no defect in a rule that it answers a time index question with a time indexed answer.
9:16–9:21The kiln did not break my definition. It only proved that whoever forgets to specify
9:21–9:25when was never speaking carefully enough to test it in the first place.
9:25–9:27I begin to see why this book took a lifetime to write.
9:27–9:33It took a lifetime because every sentence in it is already set across from an opponent exactly as sharp
9:33–9:38is the one sitting across from me tonight that is not a complaint friend that is the only kind
9:38–9:44of sentence worth building anything further upon. Act 3. The bond between smoke and fire.
9:44–9:52The lamp beside G a letter 1 E 4 5 G E executor is trimmed. Smoke curls faintly from its wick.
9:52–9:57We are ready now for the engine of every inference. Either of us will ever make the bond
9:57–10:03called viati, the invariable tie between a mark, such as smoke, and what it proves, such as fire,
10:03–10:09without a precise account of that tie, smoke, therefore fire, is a habit, not a proof. Here is a first
10:09–10:13attempt at the tie holes when the mark never appears with a thing to be proven as absent.
10:13–10:19Simple, and I think already broken, consider a purely affirmative claim with no counter-instance
10:19–10:23available anywhere to test. This is nameable, because it is noble.
10:23–10:28Everything noble happens also to be nameable. There exists no case anywhere of noble but
10:28–10:31the nameable in which you're never occurs where absent could even be checked.
10:31–10:35Your definition asks me to search a field that has no far corner to search.
10:35–10:40You have found a genuine gap and I will not paper over it. I abandoned the first attempt
10:40–10:45outright here in front of this hall exactly as readily as I abandoned my first definition of
10:45–10:50valid cognition and actidote. Let me try again the tie holds when the mark's own locus is
10:50–10:53never distinct from the locus of what it proves.
10:53–10:54No better.
10:54–10:59Restate it in terms of smoke and fire occurring in different places, and the same gap reappears
10:59–11:04wherever no such different place can even be imagined to test it against.
11:04–11:07Correct again, and here is a third attempt, and a fourth.
11:07–11:12Each closing adores the last one left open, until we reach the one I am prepared to defend
11:12–11:16against every blow you have already landed, and every one you have not yet thought
11:16–11:20to try the tie is co-location itself, the mark residing together with what it proves,
11:20–11:25in such a way that the mark's own presence is never found in a place determined, however,
11:25–11:29indirectly, by the troop, in complete absence of what it proves.
11:29–11:32Test the Mount Na, smoke rises from it, fire.
11:33–11:36Somewhere on it is co-located with that very smoke.
11:36–11:40Nowhere is there an absence of firing general standing in the same place
11:40–11:42as the particular smoke the tide holds.
11:43–11:46Stated with no gap left for corner case to hide in.
11:46–11:49You have built four definitions to survive one example.
11:49–11:51Forgive me if I am not yet dozzled."
11:51–11:54Bedazzled by the method, not the count.
11:54–11:56Notice what I did not do at any point in these four attempts.
11:56–12:00I did not simply assert my conclusion and dare you to disprove it.
12:00–12:06I built the weakest version of my own claim first, on purpose, and let you, or twice,
12:06–12:09let myself break it before a stronger version was proposed.
12:09–12:14A wall tested four times by its own Mason, and left standing is worth more than a wall
12:14–12:16no one has yet thought to push.
12:16–12:20But Akaria, how do we ever come to know such a tie in the first place once it is properly
12:20–12:21defined?
12:21–12:23I have seen smoke and fire together in a kitchen.
12:23–12:25I have not seen every fire in the world."
12:25–12:31By repeated observation, joined to the failure of any single case however hard-sought to
12:31–12:36break the pattern, and where repetition alone leaves a shadow of doubt, by further support
12:36–12:41your boozed friend himself half-ranced without noticing if smoke could truly arise apart
12:41–12:44from fire, then smoke's very dependence on fire.
12:44–12:50The fact that smoldering fuel and only smoldering fuel sends up the particular grey column would
12:50–12:56be an unexplained coincidence repeating itself in every kitchen, on every mountain, in every
12:56–12:59age with no exception ever once observed by anyone.
12:59–13:04A coincidence that never fails is no longer usefully called a coincidence.
13:04–13:06It has earned a harder name a war.
13:06–13:07Act 4.
13:07–13:09An agent behind the clay.
13:09–13:17G the Latawani 4 5G E-Esecutor lifts the jar from the table and sets it before the assembly.
13:17–13:20Every argument this evening has been sharpening a single tool.
13:20–13:22Now I put the tool to its hardest use.
13:22–13:28Earth and the other elements of this world are effects produced, risen, not eternal exactly
13:28–13:30as this juror is in effect.
13:30–13:32Nothing produced lacks a producer.
13:32–13:36Therefore, Earth and the other elements of a major precisely as this juror has
13:36–13:37a pattern.
13:37–13:41Before I attack the arguments body, I will attack its skeleton and I promise you this is not
13:41–13:44a vision, it is the same discipline you demanded of me all evening.
13:44–13:46What precisely is the subject of this inference?
13:46–13:50You cannot simply say Earth and the other elements because no single word denotes each
13:50–13:56of them individually and no single recurring feature unites them into one collective subject
13:56–13:57either.
13:57–14:01Name your subject precisely in your own idiom or the inference has nowhere to stand before
14:01–14:02it has even begun.
14:02–14:08A demand I would have made of you had our positions been reversed, and I answer it in kind rather
14:08–14:09than waiting it aside.
14:09–14:14Let the subject be whatever is in effect, and is not already known by both of us to
14:14–14:18be produced by an embodied human agent that excludes the jar, which we both already agree
14:18–14:23was made by a potter, and it excludes nothing that remains genuinely in dispute between
14:23–14:24us."
14:24–14:26Too narrow and dangerously so.
14:26–14:31On that phrasing, a sprout produced certainly yet by no embodied craftsman either falls
14:31–14:36inside your subject as readily as Earth does. Prove your conclusion for the Sprout instead
14:36–14:39quietly, and you have proven something, but you have not proven the maker of worlds. You
14:39–14:44have only smuggled a small, unremarkable case into the same door and called it the same
14:44–14:47victory. A precise objection, and I will not answer
14:47–14:52it by softening the subject further, which is the tempting mistake. I will answer it
14:52–14:55by refusing to let the Sprout stand in for Earth at all. The Sprout was never the
14:55–15:01disputed topic between us tonight. Earth was, in inference, proves its conclusion,
15:01–15:07for the subject actually named and its outset. And if I quietly substituted a sprout partway through,
15:07–15:12I would have committed the very fault I spent and go accusing you of hiding inside a definition,
15:12–15:17changing the ground beneath an argument once it grew inconvenient. The subject remains,
15:17–15:22there if, water, fire, air, taken, as the genuinely disputed effects they are,
15:22–15:28the sprout may wait its own evening. Then narrow it correctly yourself since you reject my narrowing.
15:28–15:32Say playing the agency here means being produced by someone possessing direct knowledge of the
15:32–15:38material cause desired to act an effort. The very three things a potter has standing before his wheel.
15:38–15:43I very nearly said exactly that a moment ago, and I am glad you forced me to test it before I
15:43–15:49leaned on it. Because it collapses under its own weight, you and I'd both already possessed
15:49–15:54knowledge, desire, and effort concerning countless material causes every single day. And yet
15:54–15:58earth as a whole is plainly not produced by either of us of the strength of that ordinary
15:58–16:02knowledge and desire alone. If agency meant nothing more than the bare presence of those
16:02–16:07three faculties in some person or other, the property would already be satisfied a thousand
16:07–16:13times over by ordinary living beings. In my inference, we proved nothing it did not already
16:13–16:16have to assume. Then you have refuted your own proof faster than I could have managed
16:16–16:21it myself tonight. I have refuted my own careless proof, which is a different achievement
16:21–16:26than refuting the proof itself. And it is exactly the achievement this entire evening has been
16:26–16:32training the Hall to recognize as progress, rather than defeat, what the argument actually requires
16:32–16:36as narrow as still an agent whose knowledge, desire, and effort were not merely present
16:36–16:42alongside the production of her, as mine happened to be present alongside the things I never caused,
16:42–16:46but are the effective cause of it, standing in the same causal relation to earth
16:46–16:51that the potter's knowledge, desire, and effort stand to this chore, and not merely keeping
16:51–16:55the same company as or its production the way an idle bice tinder keeps company with a fire
16:55–17:00needed not light. And can that narrower agency be found among us, a chorea, some embodied person,
17:00–17:06however hidden, who might satisfy it after all? Test it honestly and see where it leads,
17:06–17:12an embodied agent's effort. Presupposes a body, a body, on every account either of us accepts.
17:12–17:17is itself among the produced things requiring exactly this kind of maker. To explain earth
17:17–17:22by appeal to some earlier embodied agent is to borrow against the death that was never paid.
17:23–17:27Every candidate you offer me from within the world of bodies turns out to owe its own existence
17:27–17:32to the very kind of cause we are trying to locate. The chain cannot terminate in an embodied
17:32–17:38maker without either running back forever, unexplained, or stopping at last at a knower,
17:38–17:43a willer and an actor whose effort does not itself depend on a body already owed to some
17:43–17:48further maker. That is the whole of what I mean by God and no more not a larger man,
17:48–17:52but the one linked in the chain of makers who does not himself require prior maker to be there at all.
17:52–17:56You have spent an entire evening refusing to let either of us take a shortcut,
17:56–18:01not through my objections and twice tonight, not through your own first answers either.
18:01–18:05I do not yet call myself persuaded, but I no longer believe as I did when I sat down that
18:05–18:09that this conclusion was reached by skipping a single step available to skip.
18:09–18:12That is the only outcome I have ever asked this hall for.
18:12–18:16I did not come here to might to win an argument by speaking last.
18:16–18:20I came to build one sentence at a time, in front of witnesses sharp enough to catch me
18:20–18:24if any single stone in the wall was set carelessly.
18:24–18:28If the wall stands, it will not be because I raised my voice at the end.
18:28–18:32It will be because nothing in it was left untested by the time the lamp burned down.
18:32–18:38Sutra d'Hara returns as the lamp is lowered. Notice what this evening was not. It was not
18:38–18:44louder than the debates that came before it in other halls, on other nights, over other
18:44–18:50books. Gangesha Upadileya's whole method was the opposite of volume. State the claim
18:50–18:56as weekly and precisely as Omistil allows. Invite the sharpest blow available, and if
18:56–19:01the blow lands, thank the opponent and rebuild rather than bluster past the wound. He
19:01–19:07He called his book a wishfulfilling jewel and told us plainly in its own first lines
19:07–19:09whose darkness he meant it to clear.
19:09–19:16The powerful doubt of the Buddhist logicians of his age, who granted no unseen cause behind
19:16–19:20anything, neither an invocation's power nor a world's maker.
19:20–19:25He did not answer that doubt by refusing to feel its weight.
19:25–19:31He answered it by insisting four times over in one evening alone, that his own first answer
19:31–19:35had not yet earned the right to stand unchallenged.
19:35–19:40Whether that is the same thing as being right, this hall leaves, as it always does, to the
19:40–19:44one who carries the question out the door.
19:44–19:45Exhumed 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. SUTRADHARA 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, all 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 attempt in the same net. Act 1. The Inattentive Scholar. G. Alettooni, 4.5. G. E. S. Acutea is seated. A lamp burning beside him. The M. I. Macron, M. A. Macron, Lettooni, 4.3. S. Acaya and the border are both present. Every author who begins a work performs an evocation, 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 Kuran evali 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 close, 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. You, the Orner's work was completed. Is in vocation. On your account was absent or careless. On the surface, you have shown Shoma 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 could lay 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 ask 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 Loxmith'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. 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 proposed 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. Whether to 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, Ikaria. 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 one e four five g e a executor gestures toward it. For 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 an ambush, or it would not be standing here simple in front of you. Watch the Ambitious Nile take the confused cognition. Common enough I dust the shell of 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. cognition were forced to be valid or invalid as one indivisible lump, but a cognition of the shell silver is not one indivisible cling. It has 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. Next then 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, S conjunction is true, the tree. At its route, lax it 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, than 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 read 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 reciting in a substrate at a given time, exactly as it recides 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 it 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 when was never speaking 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 is 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 G a letter 1 E 4 5 G E executor 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 viati, 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 a first attempt at 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 the 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 gap and I will not paper over it. I abandoned the first attempt outright here in front of this hall exactly as readily as I abandoned my first definition of valid cognition and actidote. 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 is a third attempt, and a fourth. Each closing adores 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 co-location 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 Na, smoke rises from it, fire. Somewhere on it is co-located with that very smoke. 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 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 the 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." By 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-ranced without noticing if smoke could truly arise apart from fire, then smoke's very dependence on fire. The fact that smoldering fuel and only smoldering fuel sends up the particular grey 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 a war. Act 4. An agent behind the clay. G the Latawani 4 5G 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, 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 pattern. Before I attack the arguments body, I will attack its skeleton and I promise you this is not a vision, 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 in dispute 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 it 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, for the subject actually named and its outset. And if I quietly substituted a sprout partway through, I would have committed the very fault I spent and go accusing you of hiding inside a definition, changing the ground beneath an argument once it grew inconvenient. The subject remains, there if, 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 playing the 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, and effort concerning countless material causes every single day. And yet earth as a whole is plainly not produced by either of us of 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, we proved 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 as narrow as still an agent whose knowledge, desire, and effort were not merely present alongside the production of her, as mine happened to be present alongside the things I never caused, but are the effective cause of it, standing in the same causal relation to earth that the potter's knowledge, desire, and effort stand to this chore, and not merely keeping the same company as or its production the way an idle bice tinder keeps company with a fire needed not light. And can that narrower agency be found among us, a chorea, 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 the 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 chain 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 chain 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 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 to might 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 untested by the time the lamp burned down. Sutra d'Hara 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 Upadileya's whole method was the opposite of volume. State the claim as weekly and precisely as Omistil allows. Invite the sharpest blow available, and if the blow lands, thank the opponent and rebuild rather than bluster past the wound. He He called his book a wishfulfilling 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 hall leaves, as it always does, to the one who carries the question out the door. Exhumed Omnis.

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