The Art of Non-asserting: Dialogue with Nagarjuna

In his excellent paper, Nāgārjuna asanti-realist, Siderits showed that it makes sense to perform aconnection between the position of the Buddhist Nāgārjunaand contemporary anti realist theses such as Dummett's one. Thepoint of this talk is to argue that this connection is an importantone to perform for one's correct understanding of whatNāgārjuna is doing when he criticizes the contemporaryIndian theories of knowledge and assertion, first section, but assoon as the theories of argumentation are involved, this connectioncan be implemented in a better way from an other anti realistperspective, namely the one of Dialogical logic (Erlangen school),in which the signification is given in terms of rules in a languagegame. The philosophical issues are to hold an interpretation of thetype of assertion performed by Nāgārjuna. We here aim atmaking a rational reconstruction of his chief claim 'I do notassert any proposition' in which a proposition is considered as theset of its strategies of justification. As for the last section, the point will be to apply theseanalyses to Buddhist practice. We will in this section consider theconventional character of human activities as the fact that anyspeech act is performed within a dialogue under ad-hoc restrictions; and the question of one's progress in thesoteriological path to liberation will be asked.