Fabien Schang
15th Jaina Studies Workshop
Date: 22 March 2013 Time: 9:00 AM
Finished: 22 March 2013 Time: 5:00 PM
Venue: Brunei Gallery Room: Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre
Lecturer:
Abstract:
Jainism is part and parcel of what has been depicted under the name of "dialectical logics", or "Indian logics". What do these logical systems consist in? A special emphasis will be made about formal semantics, given that the Jain theory of sevenfold predication or saptabhaṅgī has been currently viewed as a seven-valued logic. I'll attempt to show why this is a wrong view. After making a brief remainder of modern logic, Frege's truth-values are revisited into a family of many-valued semantics. The logical values I'll call for are non-Fregean values, i.e. ordered answers to initial questions about a sentence. Then a common logic of acceptance and rejection is suggested as a common framework for two ancient Indian logics, namely: Saptabhaṅgī, and catuskoti (or tetralemma); in both cases, the main value of dialogue has a soteriological (rather than scientific) feature and accounts for a non-objectual approach to logical values. The final result is a description of dialectical systems as one-valued sub-logics, while their logicality is seriously questioned by the absence of consequence relations and the special sort of sentences in it.
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