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Circularity in the inductive justification...
reliable knowledge); interesting as this is, it is not directly relevant to my discussion of justification of vyapti.
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2. Justifications of Tarka
There are three alternative justifications for tarka offered in the Pramāṇanaya-tattvālokālaṁkāra of Vadi Devasūri : (1) a pragmatic justification which appeals to the absence of counter examples to a vyapti claim (hereafter cited as NCE): (2) a metaphysical presuppositional justification (the omniscience of the saints, sarvajña); and (3) as epistemological justification, that is, the particular-in-the-general (visesa-in-the sāmānya). All three justifications are used to support the Jaina claim that tarka is a legitimate means of generating reliable vyapti\s)."
Apart from the no-counter-example (=NCE) argument to justify tarka, further calls for justification by the prativadin (opponent) may be relegated to the two other justifications, that is, to the epistemological theory of the viseṣa-sāmānya and/or to authoritative texts (agama), the total knowledge of a Jaina omniscient (Sarvajña) saint.
The claim to exhaustive, complete knowledge (sarvajñatva) is possessed by only an omniscient one, the legitimacy of which appeals to the authority of agama. The theory of omniscience is one rather transcendental Jaina solution of the problem of justifying tarka; the pragmatic, NCE justification is a more "empirical" Jaina response to this problem. The transcendental justification seems to presuppose a correspondence theory of epistemology; that is, the omniscience theory appeals, first, to a metaphysical theory of which the empirical verification seems quite problematic to both non-Jainas and to many Jainas The NCE justification is not problematically nonempirical. Second, since this theory also appeals to experiences of a nonpublic religious nature, it generates formidable philosophical difficultes although it still remains religiously interesting, but beyond the realm of public evaluation and noncircular presuppositions. Generally speaking, there are two
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