Identity, Convention and the Criteria of Truth

Under the logic of substance, "what is it?" and "is it the same?" have answers hidden in the thing itself. A thing is what its essence makes it, and it remains the same thing as long as the essence remains. The questions may be hard, but they are factual. Somewhere in the thing, the answer is waiting to be found.

The logic of dependency moves the question. Identity is not what a thing is in itself. It is how the thing is reliably picked out. "Is it the same?" becomes "the same by which criteria, for which purpose, within which framework?" The phone with the cracked screen is the same phone for the repair shop and for the insurer. A ship whose every plank has been replaced is the same ship on the register, and perhaps not for the museum that kept the old planks. The child in an old photograph is you for your family, for your birth certificate, and for the story that runs from that afternoon to this one. Each answer is correct within its framework. None of them is found in the thing apart from the framework.

This does not make identity arbitrary. Criteria can be applied correctly or incorrectly, and they are tested against further experience. A forged passport fails. A mistaken identification in a crowd is corrected when the face turns. What has gone is only the further claim that beneath the criteria there is an identity they are trying to track: a sameness from the thing's own side, which the criteria merely detect.

For many readers this is the point at which the analysis stops being abstract. Identity seemed the most undeniable thing there was: I am I, this is this. Seen through the logic of dependency, it is not less real. Its reality is of a different kind. It is the reality of a designation that works.

The same shift changes the meaning of "conventional". The logic of substance hears the word as a demotion. Whatever is conventional is agreed on, perhaps arbitrary, certainly less than real. The real is what would be there whether or not anyone agreed, and the path must lead from the conventional to something truer behind it.

For the logic of dependency, conventional truth is the only kind of validity there is, and it is fully valid. It has standards. Tsongkhapa's three criteria sort sound conventions from mistaken ones. A valid convention is one that a conventional mind knows, that no other sound conventional knowing overturns, and that reasoning about whether things exist in themselves does not refute. The snake in the rope fails the second test: a lamp shows it is a rope. The rope taken as inherently existing fails the third. The rope as designated passes all three. Convention is not the opposite of truth. It is where truth, in every usable sense, lives.

What changes is the status of the undeniable. Under substance, certain things seem beyond question: that this table is simply here, that I am simply me, that time simply flows. They are felt not as conventions but as facts that convention merely reports. The logic of dependency shows each of them to be a designation so reliable and so habitual that its being a designation has become invisible. Nothing of its reliability is lost when this is seen. Only its claim to stand outside the framework that makes it reliable is lost.

There is no second, deeper truth for convention to fall short of. Ultimate truth is not a higher world. It is the emptiness of this one: the fact that the conventional table, the conventional self and the conventional hour are not found from their own side. There is one appearance, seen two ways.