The Thought That Says “In Some Respect”

A thought says: I failed. It says it flat, with nothing attached. KTT counts it as a thought, noticed or not, even when it arrives as a weight. An old Jain method gives a way to look at a sentence like that. The method belongs to arguments about what is real, and the sources read for this article did not test whether it changes what a thought does in a person. Using it on a personal thought is KTT’s own step.

The small word

In Jain philosophy the particle syāt is placed before a statement. It does not mean “maybe,” although it is often translated that way. It means “in some respect” or “from a certain standpoint.” Jain logicians rejected the reading of it as doubt or probability. The respect has to be one that can be named.

Seven ways of saying

The method is called syādvāda, the doctrine of conditioned statements. It is set out as a sevenfold scheme, the saptabhaṅgī. In some respect, a thing is. In some respect, it is not. In some respect, it both is and is not. In some respect, it cannot be said. The remaining three combine these. Alongside it stand anekāntavāda, the idea that reality has many sides, and nayavāda, the sorting of the standpoints a statement can be made from. Tradition places the teacher Mahāvīra around 599 to 527 BCE and says he answered such questions with a qualified yes. Later thinkers, among them Siddhasena Divākara and Samantabhadra, developed the method into a logic.

One thought, tried this way

Take the thought “I failed.” In some respect it is true: the result missed the goal. In some respect it is not: the work showed what to change. In some respect it cannot be said yet: the outcome is not in. This is KTT’s illustration, and it is not a Jain text. The method asks that each “in some respect” name the respect, such as the goal, the effort or the time frame. A vague “in some way” does not meet it.

What is not known

Whether adding “in some respect” to a thought changes what the thought does is not known. Nobody in the sources read here tested it.

Whether the method works as a habit for the thoughts of daily life, or only for the arguments it was built for, is open.

How Jain thinkers themselves would judge this use is also open. The sources read were modern summaries and encyclopedias, not Jain texts.