In classical India, Jain philosophers developed a theory of viewpoints (naya-vāda) according to which any statement is always performed within and dependent upon a given epistemic perspective or viewpoint. The Jainas furnished this epistemology with an (epistemic) theory of disputation that takes into account the viewpoint in which the main thesis has been stated. The main aim of our paper is to delve into the Jain notion of viewpoint-contextualisation and to develop the elements of a suitable logical system that should offer a reconstruction of the Jainas' epistemic theory of disputation. A crucial step of our project is to approach the Jain theory of disputation with the help of a theory of meaning for logical constants based on argumentative practices called dialogical logic. Since in the dialogical framework the meaning of the logical constants is given by the norms or rules for their use in a debate, it provides a meaning theory closer to the Jain context-sensitive disputation theory than the main-stream formal model-theoretic semantics.
Jain philosophy of logicIn classical India, Jain philosophers developed a theory of viewpoints (naya-vāda) according to which any statement is always performed within and dependent upon a given epistemic perspective or viewpoint. The Jainas furnished this epistemology with an (epistemic) theory of disputation that takes into account the viewpoint in which the main thesis has been stated. In nowadays terms, it would be quite natural to understand such a theory from a modal perspective. But the conceptions of Jain philosophers do not seem to meet modern standard (and normal) modal logic. The main reason is that viewpoint bounded epistemic operators are not part of the object language. Indeed, in the Jain framework embedding of epistemic operators, that allows travelling between viewpoints, is not possible. More precisely, viewpoint-knowledge is an implicit epistemic context that bounds the assertion of statements, not an operator that extends the set of logical constants. Moreover, each viewpoint represents a type of epistemic access to objects of the domain of discourse. This (epistemic) type defines a precise frame of the way assertions involving descriptions of those objects are to be justified. The descriptions are determined by the corresponding epistemic type. That UMR 8163
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