Getting Real: A Nyāya Epistemological Critique of Race and Gender

Abstract

This dissertation is at once a call toward a pragmatic practice of social and political philosophy as well as a reorientation of key topics within the philosophy of race and gender through the lens of realist world philosophies. The two goals of this project converge through the tradition of Nyāya, a Sanskrit philosophical tradition. In the first half of this dissertation, I challenge the efficacy of discourse theory in accounting for race- and gender-based perceptions since such a theory of perceiving social kinds that are continually coming into being is too revisionist from our commonsense experiences. Instead, I propose that Nyāya nominal properties can account for the regularity of perceptual experiences while still being predicated on cultural, social, political, or economic social kinds. In the second half, I propose that a race eliminativist position is semantically incoherent if we accept their arguments for why “there is no such thing as race.” I advance this critique by drawing a connection between the race eliminativist definition of “race” and the Nyāya theory of “horned-hares” so that we can understand how their idea of “race” results in semantic nonsense when we negate an empty term. In the final chapter, I explore how hate speech constitutes harm without a speaker’s authority from a Mīmāṃsā framework of speech acts. Ultimately, I posit that we ought to tactically shift our philosophical engagements with race and gender along realist lines that approximate commonsense epistemologies based on these few test cases. Not only will this not jeopardize our commitment toward actualizing social and political justice, but I also show how this has a strategic advantage over utilizing idealist liberatory philosophies.