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NYĀYA AND JAINA EPISTEMOLOGY
ultimately refers to reality outside, one is led to the view that a negative judgement has for its object a negative entity; however, paradoxical may seem the notion of a negative entity. The difficulty has been solved by some by equating a negative judgement with a number of the positive judgements and, thus, conceiving a negative judgement as an affirmative assertion.
In negative statements, it is said that something is not the case. It is pointed out that they may not give some significant information about what is the case. In spite of the objections against negative statements, in reality, we do make such statements. It can be argued that the nagative statement may not be informative in the sense a statement describing some positive character of a thing would be all the same it says something about a thing. Of course, it is almost tautological to say that a negative statement does not report a positive fact which makes it true. The objection that a negative statement is trivial is based on the general assumption that reality presents only positive facts which may be doubted.
There is a difference of opinion among philosophers regarding nature and status of negative judgement. In Indian philosophy, the paradox of negative judgement is an epistemological problem concerning perception.
There are two different approaches to the problem which try to solve the problem of negation 1. Realism : Epistemological realists assign a place in the outside world to whatever the mind can know. According to them, therefore, absence has reality, it is a real object, a real non-existence. Negative reality is not the exception to the general realistic principle that reality exists independently of
