[MD] conventional truth

[MarshaV]

Nagarjuna And The Limits Of Thought   


2.     Conventional and Ultimate Reality

Central to Nagarjuna's view is his doctrine of the two realities.  There is, according to Nagarjuna, conventional reality and ultimate reality.  Correspondingly, there are two truths: conventional truth, the truth about conventional reality; and ultimate truth, the truth about the ultimate reality-quaultimate reality.  For this reason, discussion of Nagarjuna's view is often phrased in terms of two truths, rather than two realities.

The things that are conventionally true are the truths concerning the empirical world. Nagarjuna generally calls this class of truths "samv¸ti-satya," or occasionally "vyavah>ra-satya."  The former is explained by Nagarjuna's commentator Candrakırti to be ambiguous.  The first sense-the one most properly translated into English as "conventional truth (reality)"  is itself three ways ambiguous: On the one hand, it can mean ordinary, or everyday.  In this sense a conventional truth is a truth to which we would ordinarily assent -common sense augmented by good science.  The second of these three meanings is truth by agreement.  In this sense, the decision in Australia to drive on the left establishes a conventional truth about the proper side of the road.  A different decision in the USA establishes another.  Conventional truth is, in this sense, often quite relative.  (Candrakırti argues that, in fact, the first sense it is also relative - relative to our sense organs, conceptual scheme, etc.  In this respect he would agree with such Pyrrhonian skeptics as Sextus.)  The final sense of this cluster is nominally true.  To be true in this sense is to be true in virtue of a particular linguistic convention.  So, for instance, the fact that shoes and boots are different kinds of things here, but are both instances of one kind-lham-in Tibetan makes their cospecificity or lack thereof a nominal matter. We English speakers, on the other hand, regard sparrows and crows both as members of a single natural superordinate kind, bird.  Native Tibetan speakers distinguish thebya (the full-sized avian) from thebya'u(the smaller relative).  (Again, relativism about truth in this sense lurks in the background.)

But these three senses cluster as one family against which stands yet another principal meaning of "samv¸ti."  It can also mean concealing, hiding, obscuring, occluding.  In this sense (aptly captured by the Tibetan "kun rdzob bden pa," literally costumed truth)a samv¸ti-satya is something that conceals the truth, or its real nature, or as it is sometimes glossed in the tradition, something regarded as a truth by an obscured or a deluded mind.  Now, the Madhyamaka tradition, following Candrakırti, makes creative use of this ambiguity, noting that, for instance, what such truths conceal is precisely the fact that they are merely conventional (in any of the senses adumbrated above) or that an obscured mind is obscured precisely in virtue of not properly understanding the role of convention in constituting truth, etc. 


http://meta-religion.com/Philosophy/Articles/Epistemology/the_limits_of_thought.htm#ixzz190Ybxujd  


 
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