Seeing Is Believing?

The Charvaka school, also called Lokayata, was a materialist school in ancient India. Its thinkers held that perception is the only reliable way to know things. What you see, hear and touch counts, and the rest is open to doubt.

Their sharpest target was inference. Other Indian schools said that where there is smoke there is fire, so seeing smoke tells us of a fire we do not see. The Charvakas asked what guarantees the link. We have seen smoke and fire together, but we have not seen every case, so the rule might fail.

Most of what we know of the school comes from its opponents, who recorded and answered its arguments. That is a caution too: weigh a view against how it is reported. The useful habit is to ask what a rule of inference rests on.

The smoke and the fire

Two hikers see smoke over a ridge. One says there must be a fire there. The other, who likes the Charvaka line, says that they have never watched every smoke, so the claim goes beyond what they saw.

They climb the ridge and find a smoking charcoal kiln, not a wildfire. The first hiker admits the inference was a guess that happened to be partly right, and they agree to say “probably a fire” until they can look.

Try this today Pick one belief you hold from inference alone, and name the observation it could one day fail.