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STUDIES IN JAINISM
any informative statement. Since things change, he seems to argue, the truths we have discovered will have to undergo change too, for we shall have to rediscover the truths about the changed thing although the criterion of truth, viz. correspondence which Jaina philosophers accept, is retained. For him, in this way, discovery of truths about changing things is a never-ending and yet not a hopeless and fruitless programme.
The entire contention of Jaina logicians seems to be based on the presupposition that the dispositions that a thi happen to be actualized in course of time. Every genuine possibility is actualized in time. It is not necessarily the case that each possibility is realized, but it can be assumed to be realized without contradiction. They hold that everything has a subvisible structure of dispositions that are, as Quine maintains, its built-in enduring structural traits; yet the typical sentences used to express human knowledge in the form of descriptive sentences are not eternal or standing sentences' but rather what are called occasion sentences'. Although the modern general philosophical opinion is that the former kind of sentences are superior, Jaina logicians seem to maintain that the sentences of the latter kind are the ones to which we assent or from which we dissent. Such assent or dissent is further determined by the feature or features of the occasion on which they are uttered. Such sentences are temporally indefinite to make explicit the full sense of which we have to employ such expressions as now etc. Even if, therefore, it is assume that there is a correspendence between grammatical and logical form of a sentence, yet it requires stipulation of occasion. Independently of such stipulation of occasion our assent to or dissent from is impotent and logically indefensible.
Our investigation so far has made it clear, it is hoped, that out of many kinds of possibilities Jaina logicians do not at all consider technical possibility in the context of Syadvada. The cases where causal considerations are predominent an account of technical or etiological possibilities is significant. But such considerations are unimportant from the point of view of descriptive statements about a thing, the proper contex of Syādva da. It
