The point of Staal's reasoning here is that while his own and Cardona's emphases may differ, these emphases nonetheless get at the same object of study (whether that be the śivasūtras, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, or other grammatical treatises) and with the same disciplinary intent, namely, to study "the grammatical structure of the language." Yet Staal criticizes Cardona's methodological prioritization of historically informed philology over systematically informed linguistics, citing Cardona as having remarked (above) that comparison of "Indian grammatical methods" with "Western methods" would be unprofitable since insight into the former remains limited. Staal sees this as "remarkably naïve" and invokes William Dwight Whitney's legacy, making a claim to the effect that actual comparison of Indian grammatical methods and Western methods is unwarranted in fact ‒ for, after all, Pāṇini's primary status as a linguist, and not as a philologist, demands that he be treated as such, in Staal's view. As a consequence, Staal maintains, scholars ought to aim at "a detailed understanding of Indian grammatical methods", insofar as that aids assessing Pāṇini as a linguist. Whether these attempts at comparison are premature is beside the point, according to some scholars, since people are performing this kind of comparison and they are doing it more often; what can be done is to assess the adequacy of these attempts. Cardona has persistently upheld the view, as referred to elsewhere, that translations (or 'comparisons') ought to be of a strict sort. To achieve this he has supplied four objectives upon which to carry out translation, namely: the formalization should not merely be an adaptation of Indian grammatical terms into Western ones; it should not obfuscate the differences between the method of Pāṇini and that of other Indian grammarians; it should put on display how Pāṇinian commentators interpreted the same rules differently; and finally, "modern interpreters should recognize their inability to arrive at a unique solution. These rules of thumb evince Cardona's concern with the tampering of Pāṇini's rules ‒ indeed, he argues that fidelity to the text and tradition in these respects supersedes the importance of absolute clarity. The criterion of scholars such as Staal, on the other hand, permits the incorporation of elements of general linguistic theory into formalizations on the basis of expediency. Other scholars hold the view ‒ which Cardona rejects outright as uncritical ‒ that Western grammatical terms on concepts can be directly imposed onto Indian ones. This approach seems