This paper analyzes the incisive counter-arguments against Gaṅgeśa’s defense of non-conceptual perception (nirvikalpakapratyakṣa) offered by the Dvaita Vedānta scholar Vyāsatīrtha (sixteenth century) in his Destructive Dance of Dialectic (Tarkatāṇḍava). The details of Vyāsatīrtha’s arguments have gone largely unnoticed by subsequent Navya Nyāya thinkers, as well as by contemporary scholars engaged in a debate over the role of non-conceptual perception in Nyāya epistemology. Vyāsatīrtha thoroughly undercuts the inductive evidence supporting Gaṅgeśa’s main inferential proof of non-conceptual perception, and shows that Gaṅgeśa has no basis for thinking that non-conceptual perception has any necessary causal role in generating concept-laden perceptual awareness. He further raises a number of internal inconsistencies and undesirable consequences for Gaṅgeśa’s claim that non-conceptual states are introspectively invisible. His own causal theory of perception is more parsimonious than the Nyāya account, and is equally compatible with direct realism. I conclude by noting several striking parallels between Vyāsatīrtha’s views and the conceptualism of John McDowell, while also suggesting that Vyāsatīrtha own conceptualism is not unduly constrained by some of McDowell’s limiting assumptions about concepts and perceptual contents.

中文翻译：

---

毕竟，原始知觉有问题：Vyāsatīrtha 对 Nirvikalpaka-Pratyakṣa 的驳斥

本文分析了 Dvaita Vedānta 学者 Vyāsatīrtha（16 世纪）在他的 Destructive Dance of Dialectic (Tarkatāṇḍava) 中针对 Gaṅgeśa 为非概念性知觉 (nirvikalpakapratyakṣa) 辩护的尖锐反驳。Vyāsatīrtha 论点的细节在很大程度上没有被随后的纳亚尼亚思想家以及当代学者所忽视，这些学者就非概念知觉在 Nyāya 认识论中的作用进行了辩论。Vyāsatīrtha 彻底削弱了支持 Gaṅgeśa 非概念知觉的主要推论证据的归纳证据，并表明 Gaṅgeśa 没有基础认为非概念知觉在产生充满概念的知觉意识中具有任何必要的因果作用。对于 Gaṅgeśa 的主张，即非概念状态是内省不可见的，他进一步提出了一些内部不一致和不良后果。他自己的知觉因果理论比 Nyāya 的解释更为简洁，并且与直接实在论同样兼容。最后，我注意到 Vyāsatīrtha 的观点与 John McDowell 的概念主义之间的几个惊人的相似之处，同时还表明 Vyāsatīrtha 自己的概念主义并没有受到 McDowell 对概念和感知内容的一些限制性假设的过度限制。