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The Logical Structure of Syādvāda
77
2. Avaktavya or 'indeterminate' could be best understood as
'indeterminate', the third truth-value of Lukasiewicz's threevalued logic. But Prof. Pandey also claims: Jainas observe that the indeterminate compound statement is a conjunction of a positive statement and its negative form and that it challenges the law of contradiction.
Both these considerations have one point in common viz. it is by challenging the law of contradiction that we arrive at the third truthvalue. But do Jainas really challenge the law of contradiction? Do they hold that the two contradictory propositions like p and -p could be true together? In that case there was no point in prefixing syāt to each statement in the seven-fold scheme. The import of the term syāt is that any given statement can be held to be true, but only in a certain respect or from a certain standpoint (kathancit). Both p and not-p are true in some respect. But of course the respect in which p is true is different from the one in which not-p is true. In this way the role of the term syātin syāt-statements is to dissolve the apparent contradiction between statements by pointing out that the truth of apparently contradictory statements is relative to the respective standpoints. The interpretation of syādvāda in terms of many-valued logic, especially Prof. Pandey's version of it, does not take due notice of this role of the term syāt.
Of course this criticism of Prof. Pandey does not answer the problem of the meaning of 'avaktavya' which according to Prof. Pandey is the third truth-value. One can try to respond to this problem in two ways.
One, the question regarding the essence of syādvāda needs to be distinguished from the question regarding the nature of the sevenfold scheme. It would not perhaps be correct to suppose that saptabhangi itself is the essence of syādvāda. One could accept syādvāda in its essence, but may not accept its articulation in terms of saptabhangi.
3. Ibid, p.161.
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