Anekantavada means non-one-sidedness, and it is the Jain claim that reality has infinite aspects while any statement can capture only one standpoint at a time. The best-known illustration, the blind men describing an elephant as a pillar, a rope, a fan and a wall, appears in Jain sources as well as Buddhist and later Sufi ones, and Jain writers use it to make a specific point: each description is accurate and none is complete, and the error lies in the claim to completeness rather than in the observation.
Two subsidiary doctrines give it precision.
Nayavada is the analysis of standpoints. A statement is made from a perspective, substantial or modal, general or particular, and identifying the perspective is part of evaluating the statement. A pot is clay from one standpoint and a pot from another; both are true and they are not the same claim.
Syadvada is the doctrine of conditional predication, which prefixes assertions with syat, in some respect. It generates a sevenfold scheme: in some respect a thing is; in some respect it is not; in some respect it is and is not; in some respect it is indescribable; and the three combinations of the fourth with the first three. The apparatus looks scholastic and is: it is a formal device for keeping the qualification visible.
The doctrine is emphatically not relativism. Jainism holds that some claims are true and others false, that its own account of soul, karma and liberation is correct, and that an omniscient being, a kevalin, perceives all aspects of all things simultaneously. Anekantavada describes the limits of non-omniscient knowledge and of language, not the absence of truth.