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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The Conception of Syādvāda 319
one ought to hold with regard to any affirmative or negative statement. In this respect a S-statement would be like a belief-statement. But then you cannot recommend a particular attitude towards a statement and this attitude cannot figure in logic as a constant factor. Moreover in a S-statement negation does not and cannot negate 'Syāt'. Obviously 'Syāt, the pen is not blue' cannot be restated as 'It is not-Syāt that the pen is blue', as we do say 'It is not true that the pen is blue'. Here the restatement would be 'Syāt' it is not true that the pen is blue', and for that matter it would also be correct to say “Syāt, it is true that the pen is blue'. Therefore in a S-statement Syāt' is not concerned with truth or falsity of the 'statement to which it is attached'. But what about the fuil S-statement ‘Syāt the pen is blue' ? We cannot ascribe truth-value to this full statement although a part of it may be true, because in that case the whole statement would be exclusive and that would defeat the very purpose of Syādvāda. So a S-statement has to be without any truth-value; it is neither true nor false. Since a S-statement neither affirms nor denies there would be no contradiction between affirming and denying statements. So ‘Syāt, the pen is blue' would not exclude “The pen is blue', nor would it be contradicted by "The pen is not blue'. Similarly 'Syāt, the pen is blue' and 'Syāt, the pen is not blue' can very well go together. In the light of this analysis one can safely conclude that pramana 'a S-statement is not opposed to naya a non-S-statement'. the former does not exclude the latter. But it must always be kept in mind that a naya has truth value whereas a pramāna does not have it. They are distinct but pramāna and naya can coexist.
AS-statement can coexist with a non-S-statement by overcoming the contradiction between affirmation and negation within the non-S statement. Therefore within a S-statement you can have both not-p together. It is in this limited sense that a S-statement includes rather than excludes non-S-statements. We have also seen that negation cannot significantly apply to a S-statement. But there may arise a real conflict between a S-statement and a statement of exclusive assertion or denial, what is called durnaya in Jaina texts. A durnaya-statement is of the form X is nothing but a' ...Here 'nothing but would be significantly used only when it is meaningful to say that x is b or c or d, and out of all the possibilities only one is ascribed to it in a given situation. The possibility of other predicates than the one asserted (anyayoga) and exclusion of all of them except the one asserted (vyavaccheda) is the function of "eva' which characterized all durnayas. In fact the phrase ‘nothing but' is convertible into 'not other
