Religious authority
As it pertains to epistemic authority
# Debates from Classical South Asia
- Right and wrong aren’t directly perceptible to humans
- But some traditions in CSA say yes: revelation/sacred texts
- The source must be āpta with regard to what’s right and wrong; must have:
- perfect knowledge of right and wrong
- the ability to communicate this knowledge
- at least lack the intention to lie, if not have the intention to communicate honestly
- Vedas are author-less so can have no faults or biases – uniquely trustworthy
- Dharmakīrti against authority of the Vedas
- Even if there was a flawless revealed source, it wouldn’t help as the the revealed source still has to be interpreted and this necessarily happens through human interactions mediated by language
- Partiality makes communication possible, words are meaning-laden (see:
terminology) because of conventions and usage
- No one, then, can know the meaning of an ‘authorless’ word: “it is not possible in the case of words that lack an [original] expounder”
- Common usage is partial and not an independent source of knowledge
- “Since the meaning of authorless words [can] be known neither from tradition, nor from reason, nor from the [ordinary] world, it is [only] proper [to say] that there is no cognition [of the meaning] in this case”
- See also: derived intentionality
- Cannot trust other humans who are also flawed
- “Indeed, a blind [person] does not find the way when led by [another] blind [person]!”
- Since no human being has overcome the confusion which is due to [moral] defects, as an expositor [of the Veda] he does not know the supersensible restriction [of Vedic words] to a particular meaning by himself