New Dimensions in Jaina Logic

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

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New Dirnensions in Jaina Logic
formulate the concomitance in their light. But to think of the validity of the rule remaining uncontradicted in future is wide of the mark. The future should be allowed to take care of itself. The sensuous experience and the logical thinking have their own prescribed limits and, therefore, one can depend upon them to a limited extent. The experience of validity at all times would depend upon super-sensuous experience which is immediate and direct and as such beyond the range of inference. For a student of logic the knowledge of the limits of concomitance and probantia is an absolute necessity. The purport of such knowledge is not to subject oneself to uncertainty and doubt or scepticism but it is identical with freedom from obstinate adherence to what is fictitious instead of an unrelenting search for what is factual. And in this way one can preserve his receptivity to new scientific discoveries intact.
The western philosopher Hume has criticised sequence of events (kramabhāva) based on causality. The causal relationship, according to him, is unknowable. We experience, of course, discrete sensations or feelings occurring in uninterrupted succession, but we never experience their internal causal relationship and its invariability. We never have a direct experience of such invariable connection between such phenomenon. The unbroken series of our sensations comes to be mistaken on account of the relationship of immediate succession among the moments, as an internal invariable causal process. All this is due to our habits and pre-dispositions fostered by repeated experiences of succession uncritically interpreted as causation. The uniformity of nature cannot be empirically ascertained. We cannot arrive at a universal or invariable rule by means of the senses.3
The necessary and invariable causal relationship cannot be, according to Hume, a subject-matter either of perception (pratyaksa) or of inference (anumāna). Ācārya Hemacandra has raised the problem of universal concomitance as incapable of being ascertained by sensuous perception. Had perception been able to ascertain the universal concomitance, then the entire cognitive activity will be satisfied by perception itself, which would make universal concomitance a fictitious enterprise. The activity of sensuous perception is strictly conf. ad to the objevi that is immediately present, and that is the limit of its activity. It is not possible to formulate any principle or arrive at any law on the basis of sensuous perception alone if the universal concomitance again