Truthfullness and Truth in Jaina Philosophy

Author(s): Peter Flugel
Publisher: ZZ_Anusandhan

Page 13

१७८
अनुसन्धान ५० (२)
contradiction. This conclusion is also borne out by the Jain analysis of the temporal aspects of action (Viy 1.1.1=13a, 9.33.2d = 484a), which explicitly denies the possibility that an action that is being performed is not equal to the completed action, as the heretic Jamāli held ('has the bed been made or is it being made'). The question of the identity of an action in time has important consequence for the evaluation of karmic consequences, also of speech-acts. Contrary to PRIESTROUTLEY's (1989) intuitions, it seems, the main technique of argumentation used by Jain philosophers in all these cases resembles Aristotle's refutation of Heraclitus and other ‘paraconsistent' thinkers in ancient Greece:
*Key parts of his analysis involved the use of time to avoid contradiction instead of saying that a changing thing was both in a given state and also not in that state, it was said that the thing was in that state at time tl, but not in that state at a different time t2— and the theory of potentiality-required to reunify these now temporarily isolated states as parts of the one (and same) change. The appeal to different temporal quantifiers illustrated the method of (alleged) equivocation used since ancient times to avoid contradiction and reinforce consistency hypothesis; namely, where both A and - A appear to hold, find a respect or factor or difference r such that it can be said that A holds in respect rl and - A in respect r2. It can then be said that a contradiction resulted only by equivocation on respect or factor r. Often however the method of alleged equivocation does not work in a convincing way, and it breaks down in an irreparable way with the semantic paradoxes, as the Megarians were the first to realize' (PRIEST-ROUTLEY 1989: 8).
Speech that is both-true-and-untrue is rejected in the Jain scriptures, because it mixes aspects which can be