Sense Perception and Rational Knowledge: India and the West

(Principles of a Comparative Study)

Abstract

The paper is an attempt to individuate a system of notions that would allow for a comparative analysis of the ideas of the relation between sense perception and rational knowledge in the Eastern and Western epistemologies. The author maintains that the traditions in question are not incommensurable because they are typologically akin. Such kindred can be observed both in the structure principles (in both cases we identify the similar components of the process of cognition: subject, object, the senses, attention, etc.; cognition can be divided in sensual, rational and supra-rational or supra-rationally intuitive) and in problematizations: similar questions are discussed regarding the status of the object of knowledge, the role of ideas, constructions of thought, direct or mediated action, truth or illusion, and so on. Three main approaches to the problem of the relation of knowledge to its object are described: “direct realism”, “representationalism” and “idealism”, as well as the ways they are employed, respectively, in Western and Indian epistemology. It is demonstrated that at the heart of the Western tradition there stands the controversy between empiricists and rationalists, whereas the Indian one is centred on that between “realists” (the object as external to knowledge) and “constructivists” (the object as a construction of knowledge).