The objection that syadvada refutes itself, noted briefly elsewhere in this collection, was pressed by a long line of non-Jain Indian philosophers, and Jain logicians developed an equally sophisticated set of replies over centuries of debate.
The core of the objection, developed by Buddhist logicians including Dharmakirti, is that the claim "every assertion is only relatively true" is itself asserted absolutely, so the doctrine either exempts itself from its own rule, which is inconsistent, or qualifies itself in turn, generating an infinite regress that never reaches a stable assertion. A further charge held that a single subject cannot coherently be said to both exist and not exist in the same respect, so the syat-qualified assertions of the saptabhangi either collapse into contradiction or fail to say anything determinate.
Jain philosophers, most systematically Haribhadra in the eighth century and Hemachandra in the twelfth, answered that the doctrine does not claim a thing both exists and does not exist in the same respect: existence is asserted from the standpoint of the thing's own substance, form, place and time, and non-existence from every other substance, form, place and time it is not; a pot exists as a pot, made of clay, here, now, and does not exist as a cloth or gold or elsewhere, an ordinary distinction stated with unusual explicitness rather than a violation of non-contradiction. On the regress charge, they held that "in some respect" is a formal marker applied consistently at every level rather than an admission of doubt requiring further qualification, a reply that satisfied Jain logicians without persuading their opponents, and the argument continued, largely unresolved, for the rest of the classical Indian philosophical period.