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Jaina Theory of Multiple Facets of Reality and Truth
not appear as an antecedent of a conditional but it looks more like an existential quantifier of the following sort
There is a standpoint such that.............. There is a way in which........... There is a respect in which. Now let us try to analyse the syāt-statement:
Syāt jīvaḥ nityaḥ in terms of the above interpretation of syāt. The statement would rather mean: (a) There is a standpoint such that 'that Self is permanent is the
case.
Now if we introduce x as a variable ranging over different standpoints and p as a constant which stands for the statement 'Self is permanent', then the same syāt-statement could be formalised as
(b) There exists some x such that x makes p true. Here I have presupposed that a relation can hold between a standpoint and proposition which could be described as 'the standpoint makes the proposition true' or that 'the proposition is true from the standpoint'. We can symbolically represent 'x makes y true' as xTy in which case the syāt-statement could be formalised as follows:
(c) (3x)(xTp)
If we want to specify that a ranges over standpoints and not anything else within the formalisation itself, then our formalisation will take a little complicated form, because we will have to introduce a propositional function Sx to mean 'x is a standpoint'. Now the syātstatement would be formalised as follows:
(d) (Ex) (Sx. xTp)
This (d) would be our standard version of the first bhanga in saptabhangī. By representing 'It is not the case that p' by '-p' and 'It is undeterminable whether p' by 'ap' we get the complete version of the sevenfold scheme of syādvāda as follows:
(1) (3x) (Sx. xTp) (2) (3x) (Sx . xT-p) (3) (3x) (Sx.xTp). (Sy) (Sy · yt-p)
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