The Jain doctrine of anekāntavāda — the many-sidedness of truth — was developed as a logical framework, but its sharpest application is interpersonal, not metaphysical. Jain philosophers argued that any proposition about reality is only partially true from any single standpoint; the error isn't being wrong, it's mistaking your angle for the whole view. What makes this genuinely strange when you bring it alongside George Herbert Mead's early 20th-century work on symbolic interactionism is this: Mead showed that human beings don't just observe others — they model how others are modeling them, in a recursive loop that never fully resolves. Put these two ideas together and you get something useful: when someone's behavior confuses or frustrates you, you're likely not dealing with a fact about them. You're dealing with one facet, refracted through your particular position in the relationship. The Jain solution wasn't empathy in the soft sense — it was syādvāda, the practice of prefacing claims with 'in some respect,' not as a verbal tic but as a genuine epistemic discipline. In a conversation today where you feel certain you understand what someone meant, try holding the interpretation as provisional — not out of politeness, but because the structure of interpersonal knowledge makes certainty here almost always premature.

In your last significant disagreement with someone, what standpoint were you unable to occupy — and what would it have changed if you had?

Drawing from Jain Philosophy combined with Symbolic Interactionism — Mahavira / George Herbert Mead