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Jaina's View of. Reality
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predications should lead to a tautology. We can present this disjunction as follows:
(P V 7P) V (POP) V (PAP) V PA (PAP)] V[(TP) A(PAP)] V [[P• 1P) A (PAP)]
As we have noted earlier, the seven predications, conjoined by the disjunction above, take the truth-values T, I, T, I, I, I respectively. Referring to the column for the disjunction in the truth-value No.2 and nothing that the disjunction is associative as can be easily checked using the same truth-table, we see that the disjunction of all these seven predications is indeed a tautology taking the truth-value T.
Accordingly the seven-fold argument of Syädväda theory of Jainism which is supposed to exhaust all the possibilities of describing the objective reality and lead to a complete description (Pramana) of the phenomenal world in terms of an always true statement can be represented as a tautology with respect to our deviant logic.
The Jains were not aware of the fact that the relativism they were proponding suggests a verdict of disfavour of all knowledge obtained and obtained and obtainable by us in the phenomenal world. For a world which is devisible into an ever exhaustible number of points of view and whose entitely we never comprehend is just inaccessible to empirical sensibilities or rational statements. Does this suggest that we require an infinite-valued deviant logic to represent the Jains epistemology or perhaps it is beyond the scope of logic.
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