Jain philosophers developed a doctrine called anekāntavāda — the principle that any complex reality has multiple valid, non-contradictory aspects — and they took it seriously enough to encode it into formal logic. What's less known is what they did with it in practice: before settling on a position, Jain thinkers were trained to explicitly state their claim with the prefix 'syāt,' meaning 'from one standpoint.' Not as a hedge, but as a structural reminder that the claim was perspective-bound. The decision-making implication is sharper than it first appears. We don't usually fail at decisions because we lack information — we fail because we mistake the view from inside one frame for the view from everywhere. Syāt thinking is a micro-practice: before committing to a course of action, append 'from the standpoint of X' to your reasoning, then ask which standpoint is doing most of the work. The standpoint you haven't named yet is usually the one that will cost you.

In a decision you're currently weighing, whose standpoint is doing almost all the work — and what would the reasoning look like from the standpoint that has no seat at the table?

Drawing from Jain Epistemology (Anekāntavāda) — Kundakunda (Samayasāra, c. 2nd–4th century CE) and the Jain logical tradition of syādvāda