This essay explores a problem for Nyāya epistemologists. It concerns the notion of pramā. Roughly speaking, a pramā is a conscious mental event of knowledge-acquisition, i.e., a conscious experience or thought in undergoing which an agent learns or comes to know something. Call any event of this sort a knowledge-event. The problem is this. On the one hand, many Naiyāyikas accept what I will call the Nyāya Definition of Knowledge, the view that a conscious experience or thought is a knowledge-event just in case it is true and non-recollective. On the other hand, they are also committed to what I shall call Nyāya Infallibilism, the thesis that every knowledge-event is produced by causes that couldn’t have given rise to an error. These two commitments seem to conflict with each other in cases of epistemic luck, i.e., cases where an agent arrives a true judgement accidentally or as a matter of luck. While the Nyāya Definition of Knowledge seems to predict that these judgements are knowledge-events, Nyāya Infallibilism seems to entail that they aren’t. In this essay, I show that Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya, the 14th century Naiyāyika, solves this problem by adopting what I call epistemic localism, the view that upstream causal factors play no epistemically significant role in the production of knowledge.

本文探讨了Nyāya认识论者的问题。它涉及pramā的概念。粗略地讲，普拉玛是知识获取的一种有意识的心理事件，即代理人学习或了解某事所经历的一种有意识的经历或思想。将此类事件称为知识事件。问题是这样的。一方面，许多Naiyāyikas接受我称为“知识的Nyāya定义”的观点，即有意识的经验或思想是知识事件，以防万一它是真实的和不可回忆的。另一方面，他们也致力于我所说的尼亚亚谬误主义，即每个知识事件都是由不会引起错误的原因产生的。在认知运气的情况下，即代理人偶然或因运气得出正确判断的情况下，这两个承诺似乎相互冲突。尽管Nyāya知识的定义似乎预言了这些判断是知识事件，但Nyāya谬误论似乎意味着并非如此。在本文中，我证明了14世纪的奈加耶卡（GaigeāaUpādhyāya）通过我所谓的认识论局部主义解决了这一问题，即上游因果因素在知识生产中没有认识论上的重要作用。