Book Title: Facets of Jain Philosophy Religion and Culture
Author(s): Shreechand Rampuriya, Ashwini Kumar, T M Dak, Anil Dutt Mishra
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati
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304 Anekantavāda and Syādvāda
potentialities would demand an assumption of number of propositions descriptive of them, a change in the truth-value would demand that number of propositions available at our disposal is a limited one. Perhaps a distinction is sought to be made between propositions descriptive of potentialities and those descriptive of actualities, the latter being treated as genuinely descriptive of the nature of a thing. Obviously the number of the statements of the latter kind is limited. If this phenomenon is connected with changing things then change in truth-value seems a possible alternative. But still, why not frame a new proposition ? Inspite of the fact that Jaina logicians admit temporality within the fold of their logic what would be their reaction to this problem is very difficult to say. But we need not bother further about this issue here.
One thing, nevertheless, is clear. The doctrine of the change of truth-value neither amounts to the doctrine of relativity, nor scepticism nor again to the notion of historical relativity. For the position of an historical relativist is different from that of the one who holds possibility of change in truth-value of a proposition. What historical relativist is out to maintain is that we do not have any absolute truths simply because we do not have any absolute criterion of truth. The one, on the contrary, who argues in terms of changing truth is not at all bothered about change in the criterion of truth. That is, he is not saying the truth value changes because our criterion of truth changes. What he focusses his attention on is change in object about which we are making a statement. Since things change, he seems to argue, the truths we have discovered will have to undergo change too for we shall have !o rediscover the truths about the changed thing although the criterion of truth, viz. correspondence which Jaina philosophers accept, is retained. For him, in this way, discovery of truths about changing nings is a never-ending and yet not a hopeless and fruitless progamme.
The entire contention of Jaina logicians seems to be based on the Presupposition that the dispositions that a thing has happened to be stualized in course of time. Every genuine possibility is actualized in ime. It is not necessarily the case that each possibility is realized but it can be assumed to be realized without contradiction. They hold that everything has a “sub-visible structure of dispositions that are, as Quine maintains, “its build-in enduring structural traits'; yet the typical sentences used to express human knowledge in the form of descriptive sentences are not 'eternal or standing sentences' but rather what are called 'occassion sentences. Although the general philosophical
