Can Inference Be Valid?

A fundamental difficulty in dharmakirti’s system, sharply highlighted by orthodox Hindu critics and explored in dreyfus-recognizing-reality, Chapter 18.

The Problem

Dharmakīrti’s ontology restricts reality to the specifically-characterised — momentary, causally effective individuals. But inference operates with the generally-characterised — conceptual constructs (universals, properties) that are, by Dharmakīrti’s own account, unreal.

If the objects of inference are unreal, how can inference count as genuine valid-cognition? There seems to be a fatal gap between:

• What inference grasps (conceptual universals)
• What actually exists (individuals)

Responses

Dharmakīrti’s Own Response

Inference is valid practically — it leads to successful engagement with reality, even though it operates through the conceptual fiction of universals. The apoha theory explains how concepts track reality through exclusion without requiring real universals.

The Ge-luk Realist Answer

By granting universals a moderate degree of reality, the Ge-luk tradition provides ontological support for inference. If universals really exist (as properties dependent on their instances), then inference genuinely grasps something real. This is one of the major philosophical motivations for Ge-luk moderate realism (dreyfus-recognizing-reality, Chapter 18).

The Sa-gya Position

Maintains that inference is pragmatically valid despite its objects being conceptual. The gap between concept and reality is a feature of the system, not a bug — it reflects the fundamentally mistaken nature of conceptual thought, which Buddhist practice aims to transcend.

Significance

This problem reveals the deepest tension in Buddhist epistemology: the need for a systematic account of knowledge that can ground reasoning and inference, combined with an ontology that undercuts the foundations such an account would normally require.

The Bifurcation of Knowledge

A related difficulty: dignaga rejects pramāṇasamplava (mixing of epistemic instruments). When we infer fire from smoke and later perceive the fire, we do not achieve a second perspective on the same fire — the perceived fire (svalakṣaṇa) and the inferred fire (sāmānyalakṣaṇa) are radically distinct objects. The apoha theory was developed partly to bridge this gap between the manifest image and the reductionist vision (westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti, pp. 234–235).

Sources

• dreyfus-recognizing-reality — Chapter 18
• westerhoff-dignaga-dharmakirti — bifurcation of knowledge, fallibilism and externalism of inference (pp. 230, 234–235)