ABSTRACT
Sellars and Dharmakīrti both distinguish two distinct orders of truth, each with its own standards for determining what’s real. At first glance, the temptation would be to align (1) Sellars’ manifest image with Dharmakīrti’s conventional reality of universals that persons construct in relation to goal-oriented activity and (2) Sellars’ scientific image with Dharmakīrti’s ultimate reality of particulars which, while not directly observable in and of themselves, are the real basis for the phenomena of the conventional world. Looking at both the full range of what Sellars intends to accomplish with the scientific image and the complexity of Dharmakīrti’s larger discussion of levels of reality, however, indicates that the parallel is not so simple. In an ingenious twist on the two truths model, Dharmakīrti ultimately delimits not two levels of reality but three. His reasons for doing so fundamentally challenge the coherence of the scientific enterprise as Sellars sees it by denying that what things are can be explained through an appeal to how things work. Dharmakīrti’s position here moves far beyond a mere agnosticism about the accord between our theories and the world. He argues that rational analysis shows that (1) causality defines reality in the conventional world; and (2) causally efficacious things cannot be ultimately real. It doesn’t matter how good our theories become; in the end, we’re just getting better and better at describing a mirage. If Dharmakīrti’s arguments are successful, they provide a significant challenge to a Sellarisian scientific realist project. No matter how refined the manifest image becomes, it will never fully align with an ideal scientific image. There simply is no such thing as an account that perfectly draws together ontology and causality, what things are with how things work.
