Facets of Jain Philosophy Religion and Culture

Author(s): Shreechand Rampuriya, Ashwini Kumar, T M Dak, Anil Dutt Mishra
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati

Page 176

Anekānta, Syādvāda and Saptabhangi 159
Relativism and Laws of Thought Let us now see if this relativism of predication has any bearing on the traditional Laws of Thought, which, to be significant, must, besides being true measures of reality, formulate principles of valid predication.
The Law of Identity is the simplest of all possible laws of judgments and must. to be significant, set forth their minimum conditions, viz. meaning and truth. A judgment which has no meaning is no judgment, and a judgment whose truth cannot be ascertained is an idle gibberish.
in its bare form 'Ais A', the law does not possess any significance and is apparntly nothing more than tautology. If, however, it is taken to express the inere identity of the subject and the predicate, it only half way towards the acquisition of meaning, because it leaves out the difference without which the identity is unmeaning. In order, therefore, to invest the form 'A is A' with full meaning and truth, we should interpret the predicate A as a characteristic 'a' which is true of a part of the subject A. We now have the form ‘A (a b...) is a' which is meaningful, because it exhibits in full the identity-cumdifference between the subject and the predicate, and also true, because the predicate belongs to the subject. In the language of the Jaina philosopher, the above form can be expressed as 'In one particular aspect, A is a'. The Law of Identity thus becomes significant if interpreted in the light of Syädväda.
Here one important fact about judgment or proposition22 should be clearly understood. A proposition which is once true is always true. Certain logicians have denied this dictum, and ti denial appears to be due to, in the words of Mr Johnson, "a confusion between the time of which an assertion is made, and the time to
the predicate. And, because of this which is outside, the predicate, in the end, may be called conditional. In brief, the difference between subject and predicate, a difference essential to truth, is not accounted for. It depends on something not included within the judgment itself, an element outlying and, therefore, in a sense unknown. The type and the essence, in other words, can never reach the reality. The essence realized, we may say, is too much to be truth, and unrealized and abstract, it is assuredly too little to be real. Even absolute truth in the end seems thus to turn
out erroneous."'-Ibid., p. 482. 22. We agree with W. E. Johnson (Logic, Part I, p.1) in regarding a proposition as
'that of which truth and falsity can be significantly predicated' and also in refuting the view that the proposition is the verbal expression of the judgment as an error