We are living through a strange rediscovery. Machines that produce fluent, confident, sometimes wholly fabricated claims have forced a question the technical world had mostly ignor…
A valid means of knowledge—an accepted route by which a claim can be established as true.
Of the four, shabda—valid testimony—is the most fraught, and the most alive today. Most of what any of us knows, we know because someone reliable told us.
Here is the connection that genuinely startled me while building an AI system. A large language model is, in effect, pure shabda with no theory of shabda.
Long before AI hallucination, Indian philosophy asked how we know what we know. Pramana—and especially shabda, valid testimony—is the original theory of trustworthy knowledge.