Abstract

This article announces an ethnomethodological study of the formal analytic practices of Tibetan philosophers engaged in the collaborative work of producing correct philosophical debates. Tibetan scholar-monks address themselves to the work of sustaining an argument, providing formal warrants for authorizing truth and correctness, objectivating their accounts and disengaging those accounts from their local organizational practices. At the same time, it is the concern of the Tibetans' dialectics to avoid naive acceptance of reified accounts. The announced study proposes to describe their philosophical activities and to locate what originality may affect resolving the tension between formal analytic work and philosophical insight into truth.