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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344 Anekāntavāda and Syädvāda denoted by V, of these seven predication should lead to a tautology. We can represent this disjunction as follows :
(PV]P) v (po 7P) V (P A 7P) V [PA (PAP)] V[(7P) ^ (PAP)] V [(Po P) A (PAP)]
As we have noted earlier, the seven predications, conjoined by the disjunction above, take the truth-value T, I, T, I, I, I respectively. Referring to the column for the disjunction in the truth-value No. 2 and noting 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.
Conclusion Accordingly the seven-fold argument of Syādvāda theory of Jainism which is supposed to exhaust all the possibilities of describing the objective reality and lead to a complete description (pramāna) of the phenomenal world in terms of an always true statement can be represented as a tautology with respect to our deviant logic.
The Jainas were not unaware of the fact that the relativism they were propounding suggests a verdict of disfavour of all knowledge obtained and obtainable by us in the phenomenal world. For a world which is divisible into an ever inexhaustible number of points of view and whose entirety 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 Jaina epistemology or perhaps it is beyond the scope of logic ?
