Truthfullness and Truth in Jaina Philosophy

Author(s): Peter Flugel
Publisher: ZZ_Anusandhan

Page 11

१७६
31LHEITA 40 (?)
‘after promising to give something at the end of a fortnight, gives it after a month or a year' (HANDIQUI 1968: 265). He also mentions the statement 'he cooks food or weaves clothes as one which is to some extent true but on the whole false because 'properly speaking, one cooks rice etc. and weaves yarn'. A different example of mixed speech, mentioned in Viy 18.7.1 (749a), are utterances of someone who is possessed. The fact that this case, referring to an existentially mixed psycho-physical state rather than to semantic ambiguity, cannot be easily fitted into any of the ten categories illustrates that the list is not exhaustive. From other viewpoints, the examples may also fit the categories of the other lists.
All of the ten enumerated modalities seem to refer to utterances in which the universal and the particular, or modalities of time, quantifiers, or other categories,55 are mixed up in an indiscriminate and hence ambiguous way.56 Though the mistakes discussed in the texts seem to be primarily based on indiscriminate cognition, producing objectionable uncertainty (cf. Āyāra 2.4.1–2), the ten categories are very broad and can cover a great variety of motives, logical and semantic conundrums, such as vagueness or paradoxes, and linguistic forms and discursive strategies, such as off-record uses of metaphor, similes, veiled speech and politeness, which GRICE (1975) and BROWN-LEVINSON (1978) have analysed as popular forms for saying one thing and meaning another. 57 These phenomena deserve more detailed analysis in future studies. For the purpose of this essay, a few comparative notes on the implications of the findings for the question of the stance of Jain philosophy on the law of non-contradiction must suffice.
For PRIEST-ROUTLEY (1989: 3), 'admission or insistence, that some statement is both true and false, in a context where not everything is accepted or some things are rejected, is a sure sign of a paraconsistent approach—in fact