The publisher imposed a strict 90,000-word limit on the book, which meant that I had to leave out much of the research history that led to it. I plan on writing a Substack on it and will link that here. But for now, I report some high-level characteristics of the book.
The book is unusual by conventional standards for several reasons.
(1) It reads very much like fastidious analytic philosophy. I am insistent on presenting my arguments in standard form, conforming strictly to the requirements of logic, and making every step explicit.
One cost of this approach is that readers without much practice in this style of work often find it difficult. I find that a lot of people experience their eyes glaze over when you present them with arguments and then further arguments based on reasoning itself. Faced with that reality, I made a deliberate decision to introduce critical—and sometimes disparaging—language in my framing of the opposing view. I do this to get people to viscerally feel that there is something at stake in the argument that has emotional significance. It’s a rhetorical device: it doesn’t play a role in the argument. But if the argument is sound, then the disparaging language is apt. I plan on a Substack on that too.
(2) The book is also unusual, as it is highly abstract and also historical. It is abstract in its treatment of reason, logic, and oppression. Specifically, I show that interpretation is based on the Linguistic Account of Thought, while explication depends upon another model I call Linguistic Externalism (LE). But if this is true, then we should be able to observe different histories for traditions that begin with differing starting points, given their models of thought. And it so happens that the West acclaims LAT, it’s controversial in China, but ancient South Asia was definitely founded on LE. If this is true, then history is actually a longitudinal study, and each tradition can be compared with the others, which function as control groups relative to the tradition of interest. And what happens is that history unfolds just as we would expect it to, given these differing starting points.
(3) It’s a book based on insights from South Asian moral philosophy, which, according to a Westernized world, does not exist. And yet, with these insights, we can objectively study and compare the competing traditions.
What this explicatory investigation shows is that the usual myths are the inverse of what is real. Usually, Indigenous peoples are depicted as mysterious, spiritual, and nonrational, while colonizers are touted as the only people with a plan. But in reality, colonizers are irrational, and Indigenous people are completely reasonable.
(4) I provide a logic-based argument that we have a rational obligation to get rid of oppression. This is very different from a values-based argument.
Finally, I argue that we have a great deal to learn from Indigenous peoples, and that doing so requires learning how to be Indigenous in a philosophical sense—by adopting LE.
