Jainism

[Belacqua]

those who are partial to Dialectalism

I don't think there's any dialectic going on in the description above. It's more of a structure to organize different combinations of assertions. 

I like it a lot, because it takes into account that human beings have a number of different, incompatible philosophical perspectives, and it holds all of them in mind. 

Some of it needs further explanation. For example, I'm not quite sure what "non-assertible" means. Is that an assertion which has no meaningful content, like "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"? That might be what it means. A statement would either be true, false, or, like colorless green ideas, not really something that can be asserted. Famously, the Logical Positivists claimed that any metaphysical idea is not assertible in this sense. 

So as an example, we might say that syat from the standpoint of classical metaphysics, "everything created depends for its existence on logically prior conditions." But syat from the standpoint of Logical Positivism, "everything created depends for its existence on logically prior conditions" is not something that can even be asserted. 

Different people hold to each of these views, they are incompatible, but we could plug them into the Jain system to compare them. At least that's what I think it's getting at. 

The nice thing is that it holds in mind or coordinates different philosophical perspectives -- called here "standpoints" -- without asserting that any one of them must be true.

From this brief account, it brings to mind Thomas Nagel's idea of "the view from nowhere." As I understand it, he says that science attempts to describe the world as if the description doesn't come from any particular viewpoint. This may not be possible and may be a holdover from the notion of an omniscient god. It looks as though the Jains would be more careful than scientists, if it's true that science wants its truths to be true from every possible viewpoint. Using their structure, we could say that syat according to the viewpoint of modern Western official science, X is real, but other viewpoints disagree. Thomas Aquinas, for what it's worth, was careful to say that only God sees the world from all possible viewpoints, while humans, beings animals, view the world according to the kind of animals we are. 

Is there anything about this logical structure which makes it particularly Jain? Or is it just that it was Jain philosophers who came up with it? I mean, Jainism holds to mind/body dualism, which is a metaphysical proposition, and would not be true in every standpoint. 

If there's nothing essentially Jain about it, then I don't see it as evidence that Jainism is a great improvement over the achievements of other religions. Christians, Jews, and Muslims have done important work in logic. If Jains have also done good work, that doesn't necessarily prove that the religion is better.