ABSTRACT
Most Buddhists share with Wilfred Sellars a recognition of two hierarchical frameworks or world-pictures. For Sellars, they are respectively the manifest image and the scientific image; for Buddhists, they are the customary (saṃvṛti) and the ultimate (paramārtha). Such framework-based thinking presents serious problems: we are confronted with the specter of elimination of the inferior worldview in favor of the superior and the specter of the unintelligibility of intensional entities that only exist within frameworks. Deflationary philosophies need have no truck with hierarchical frameworks; duly deflated Buddhism need not, either, and is, in our opinion, better off without them.
