The Reinstallation of the Getty Villa: Plenty of Beauty but Only Partial Truth

This chapter argues that partial truth is apt to strike us as sneaky, unclean, the last refuge of a scoundrel. But, whether a statement is partly true, or true in what it says about BLAH, may be all that we want to know. A statement S is partly true insofar as it has wholly true parts: wholly true implications whose subject matter is included in that of S. An account of subject matter will thus be needed, and of the relation (“aboutness”) that sentences bear to their subject matters, if we want to understand partial truth. Aboutness has been somewhat neglected in philosophy. But not entirely; think of Frege on identity, Kripke on counterparts, van Fraassen on empirical adequacy, Yalcin on epistemic modals, and Hempel on confirmation. Subject matter will be treated here as an independent factor in meaning, over and above truth-conditional content. Not completely independent, though, for what a sentence is about is tied up with its ways of being true and false.

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Manifoldness, Jaina theory of

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy ◽

10.4324/9780415249126-f044-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Jayandra Soni

Keyword(s):

Complex Nature ◽

Partial Truth

The Sanskrit term anekāntavāda literally means ‘not-one-sided doctrine’, and refers to the Jaina epistemological theory of manifold standpoints from which an object may be considered and the manifold predications that can be made with regard to it. It evolved out of Mahāvīra’s ethical emphasis on nonviolence – the multidimensional nature of objects should not be violated by single, absolutist (ekānta) predications about them. Respect for life is thus transformed in its philosophical application into a principle of respect for other views. The theory has come to be called the central philosophy of Jainism and was developed in a milieu of intensive debate between the various Indian philosophical schools. Though the theory was based on Mahāvīra’s teaching, it implicitly presupposed, in its later highly developed form, various philosophical alternatives (representing the views of other schools of thought), which it sought to syncretize. Each standpoint and predication presents a partial truth and, according to Jainism, only the theory of manifoldness does justice to the complex nature of entities. While it can be seen as an attempt to practice intellectual nonviolence, it is evident that the Jainas adhered to it zealously and defended it as vehemently as the others did their own views.

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