Friday, December 16, 2005

Criteria of Knowledge

In the summary of the book The Essential Vedanta : A New Source Book of Advaita Vedanta by Eliot Deutsch and Rohit Dalvi, there is a section in which the authors define the criteria of knowledge:


All knowledge is intrinsically valid. One can falsify a judgement by experience which is contradictory to it, but one can never completely verify a judgement by external means.

All knowledge acquired through the various pramanas [means of valid knowledge] is valid in its own proper sphere, but insofar as it is subject to contradiction by another qualitatively different kind of experience it is necessarily "relative" knowledge. Brahman-knowledge is alone incapable of contradiction.


There definitely are trends of similarity between these two statements and the statements of Godel's incompleteness theorem from logic.

I am not sure if these are general inferences that the authors make, or have translated them from definite sources in Vedanta. Yet to verify.

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