Pramanasamuccaya
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A Buddhist logician reduces the valid means of knowledge to two, perception and inference, and rebuilds Indian epistemology around what each can and cannot deliver.
- exactly two means of knowledge, perception and inference
- perception defined as free of conceptual construction
- meaning by exclusion rather than by positive universals
- formal conditions for a valid inferential sign
Dignaga argued that there are exactly two sources of knowledge because there are exactly two kinds of object: the particular, grasped by perception without any conceptual content, and the universal, reached only by inference. His theory of exclusion holds that a word does not name a positive universal but marks off what a thing is not. He also formalised the conditions a valid inferential mark must satisfy. The system provoked centuries of reply from Nyaya and Mimamsa opponents and reorganised philosophical debate across traditions.
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