New Dimensions in Jaina Logic

Author(s): Mahaprajna Acharya, Nathmal Tatia
Publisher: Today and Tommorrow Printers and Publishers

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New Dimensions in Jaina Logic
The waving of the index finger symbolises an act of admonishing and the person conversant with the act is capable of understanding the warning. The verbal conventions function exactly in the same manner.
According to the Mimämsakas the word stands for the universal alone. The word cow does not stand for a particular cow but refers to the universal called cowhood. A convention is possible only with reference to the universal and not in respect of particular cows that are countless in number. The standpoint of Jaina logician is quite different. According to him the referend of a word is the thing, that is, a composite of the universal and the particular. Pure universal has no causal efficiency (arthakriyākāritva). The particular object like a jar, or a piece of cloth, has such efficiency, but jarhood or clothhood are devoid of any such function. It is not difficult to comprehend the verbal convention in spite of the countless number of individuals signified by the particular word. The fire qua probandum and the smoke qua probans are countless, but there is no difficulty for the organ of reasoning to comprehend all those particular fires and smokes for ascertaining their universal concomitance. If so, why should it not be possible to understand a particular word or symbol as standing for the countless individuals. A real is ipso facto a universal and particular rolled into one, and as such pure universal or pure particular cannot be the meaning of the word. It is only the entity as universal-cum-particular that is a referent of a word.
The relation between the word and the meaning is not like the relation of universal concomitance (vyāpti) between smoke and fire. Their relation is one of identity-cum-difference. If the relation between the word and its meaning is one of absolute identity, then the word fire and the meaning fire would be identical and that would mean the act of combustion on the utterance of the word 'fire'. But this does not happen, implying thereby that there is no relation of universal concomitance between a word and its meaning. On the other hand, if a word is absolutely different from its meaning, the relation of denotative and denotatum (vācyavūca-.. ka-sambandha) between them would be impossible. The object jar is understood from the jar as a verbal symbol, because there is some sort of relationship between the objective aspect called denotatum and the verbal aspect called denotative.
The objective jar alone and not anything else is known to be the meaning of the word jar as the verbal symbol. The popular con