Dignāga (Diṅnāga)
c. 480–540 CE · Indo-Tibetan Buddhism · Known
Dignaga was a south Indian logician who founded the Buddhist tradition of pramana, the study of what counts as valid knowing, and wrote the Pramanasamuccaya. There are two ways of knowing and only two: bare perception, which grasps a unique particular, and inference, which works on concepts we build. Words name nothing real. Cow means not non-cow, a fence drawn around a thing rather than a shared essence inside it, and unique particulars are the only real things.
Signature
The position Dignāga is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Universals
- strongly leans Realism
- Language
- Conventional
Positions on the 1 axes the sources answer
- Universals
- strongly leans Realism (7 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
19 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Dignāga refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Perception
- Indirect Realism
What do we directly perceive? - Language
- Conventional
What is the fundamental nature of language?