Studies in Indian Philosophy

SR No.: 001580
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Dalsukh Malvania, Nagin J Shah
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad
Publication Year: 1981
Total Pages: 352
Language: English
Classification: Book_English, Philosophy, Epistemology, & Religion
File Size: 21 MB

Page 146

Circularity in the inductive justification...
In the Jaina context having good reasons " here presupposes NCE; having "confidence" entails having no doubts (samsaya); having 'good reasons" is a necessary condition for authorizing one to act on certain allegedly reliable vyapti(s). Therefore I conclude that having these "good reasons," and thus confidence to support and justify one's empirical claims and to justify the uses of the logical machinery of inferenceschema-for-another (parārthānumāna), does justify the use of inductive reasoning. This in turn entails the use of such circular presuppositions. Having confidence in tarka entails the highly probable expectation of successful outcomes. Thus the prativadin's (disputant's) call for successive, independent justifications of the general theory of vyapti is as logically circular and as methodologically unreasonable as asking "Is the Law Legal? Also it should be pointed out that, although we have here a case of logical circularity, it is not a vicious one; the plane of discourse remains firmly tied down to verifiable and empirical reality in most cases and prima facie empirical falsification is always theoretically possible.94
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Thus this article is not a case, as often claimed by those philologists ignorant of any philosophy of logic, of projecting modern logical theories upon ancient texts;25 rather, both some twelfth century Jainas and some modern philosophers were/are interested in logic theory and the age old global problems of grounds for reasonable reliable knowlege. The ancient Jaina vocabularies and explicit procedures are obviously exciting and quite different, but, I would hold they are implicitly compatible with similar types of investigation in the Western philosophical traditions. However, these cross-cultural analyses have just begun; and most comparative "philosophers" seem neither prepared for nor interested in such formalistic topics.
If we are to suppose, as I do suppose, that the crosscultural investigation of patterns and methods of philosophical reasoning are worth investigating, then I find here a particularly interesting example of some problems in inductive reasoning: and by this I mean the pragmatic justification of the funda