TWO STRAINS IN BUDDHIST CAUSALITY

This essay will focus on the Buddhist metaphysics of experience which is generally glossed over due to the excessive concern for the ultimate goal in Buddhism, nirvīna , and in consequence of which the emphasis has been on the practice of; meditative discipline in aspiration for that goal. Yet neither nirvana nor meditative discipline can be understood properly without examining the full dimension of our ordinary experience. Such an examination should reveal to us the unique ways in which the Buddhist refers to the bounded and unbounded conditions of existence. All this is novel insofar as metaphysics goes and indeed it would have to be a unique form of metaphysics in order to accommodate the dual aspect of existence. The key to this metaphysics lodges in the Buddhist concept of experiential process,¹ technically known as pratītyasamutpāda which is variously translated as relational origination, interrelational origination or dependent origination. It refers to the Buddhist concept of causality but, as we shall see, it is a unique concept with more than the usual Western connotation.     

Mental representation of logical connectives

Logical connectives, such as “AND”, “OR”, “IF . . . THEN”, and “IF AND ONLY IF” are ubiquitous in both language and cognition; however, reasoning with logical connectives is error-prone. We argue that some of these errors may stem from people's tendency to minimize the number of possibilities compatible with logical connectives and to construct a “minimalist” one-possibility representation. As a result, connectives denoting a single possibility (e.g., conjunctions) are likely to be represented correctly, whereas connectives denoting multiple possibilities (e.g., disjunctions or conditionals) are likely to be erroneously represented as conjunctions. These predictions were tested and confirmed in three experiments using different paradigms. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a multiple-choice task and asked to select all and only those possibilities that would indicate that compound verbal propositions were true versus false. In Experiment 2, a somewhat similar task was used, except that participants were asked later to perform a cued recall of verbal propositions. Finally, Experiment 3 used an old/new recognition paradigm to examine participants' ability to accurately recognize different logical connectives. The results of the three experiments are discussed in relation to theories of representation of possibilities and theories of reasoning.