## 1. Life, works, and influence


### 1.1 Indian philosophical debate in the middle of the first millennium




Having flourished in the latter part of the seventh
century ce, Kumarila Bhatta
was roughly contemporaneous with the Buddhist philosopher
Dharmakirti, whose own predecessor Dignaga was among the philosophical rivals whom Kumarila critically engaged; Kumarila has long been recognized as a significant influence on his younger contemporary Sankara
(fl. c. 710). Kumarila thus wrote at a time of profoundly significant
philosophical activity in India, contributing much to a pan-Sanskritic
discourse--sometimes referred to as
*pramana-sastra*, or the "discipline of epistemic warrants"--that was
characterized by shared standards of rationality and inter-traditional
debate. Pressed from all sides by opponents from rival schools of thought, Indian philosophers at this time were keen to maintain the consistency of their various commitments in the face of critique; with all these disputants sharing a Sanskritic philosophical vocabulary that had been refined particularly by Buddhists, India's philosophical traditions quickly developed in subtlety and sophistication from this point on.




Characteristic of this period of inter-traditional debate is the
legendary account of Kumarila as having studied for a time at the
famous Buddhist monastic university at Nalanda, then in its
prime. Based on the mastery of Buddhist doctrine he thus gained,
Kumarila went on to decisively counter Buddhist
philosophical positions. According to a Buddhist variation on such
legendary reflections of the state of philosophical contestation (one
recorded by the 17th-century Tibetan historian Taranatha),
Kumarila is indeed represented as having defeated various lesser
Buddhist thinkers in debate. However, his renown prompted the Buddhist
Dharmakirti, in turn, to go in disguise to study with
Kumarila,
from whom Dharmakirti learns
the key to Kumarila's thought and then bests *him* in debate,
converting Kumarila and his followers to Buddhism. As history,
such accounts are surely as suspect as the view (still attested
in some Indian scholarship) that Kumarila's dialectical
successes are chiefly to be credited for the decline of Indian
Buddhism. Nevertheless, these traditions confirm at least that
Kumarila was a formidable philosophical opponent of his Buddhist
counterparts. It is fitting, then, that among the sources for studying
Kumarila's thought should be not only the texts of
Mimamsaka commentators on his work--particularly Umveka
Bhatta (fl. c. 710), Parthasarathimisra (fl.
c. 1075), and Sucaritamisra (c.1120)--but also the work of the scholar Buddhist
Santaraksita (c.725-788), whose massive
*Tattvasamgraha* extensively engages (and quotes from the
works of) Kumarila.


### 1.2 The Brahmanical tradition of Purva Mimamsa




It is sometimes surmised from his evident knowledge of Dravidian
languages (his *Tantravarttika* includes some discussion of
Tamil word forms) that Kumarila may have been south Indian; as
is typically the case for the figures of classical Indian philosophy, though,
he is really known to us only in the stylized terms of traditional
hagiographies. What is certain is that Kumarila was one of the two
most significant commentators on the foundational texts of the
tradition of Purva Mimamsa; indeed, this
orthodox Brahmanical tradition of thought divides chiefly along two
lines of seventh- and eighth-century commentary, with those
Mimamsakas who take their bearings from Kumarila
having been styled *Bhattas* ("followers of
Bhatta"), while those who defer instead to
Prabhakara--who flourished around 700, and who is sometimes
said to have been Kumarila's student--are
comparably called "Prabhakaras."




Insofar as this central divergence between Kumarila and
Prabhakara involves reference to a shared foundation of texts, it
is important to appreciate the traditional Brahmanical context for
Kumarila's thought. "Mimamsa" literally means something like "investigation" or "inquiry," but here refers particularly to *hermeneutical* inquiry. Kumarila's tradition of
*Purva* ("prior") Mimamsa,
then, is typically so denominated in contrast to
"*Uttara*," or "subsequent,"
Mimamsa. 

Both strands of
Mimamsa have as their guiding concern the
interpretation and right application of Vedic texts, which these two
schools agree in thinking to be uniquely authoritative for matters of
ultimate concern. These schools differ chiefly over which portion of
this vast corpus of texts should be thought definitive; for
"Veda"--a scriptural category that is arguably
definitive of "Hinduism"--represents a status
traditionally claimed for a huge range of texts, composed over a large
period of time (from c. 1200 bce to early in the first millennium
and even later), and comprising a wide spectrum of literary genres and
characteristic doctrines. Advocacy of the "Purva"
Mimamsa position is defined by commitment to the
authority particularly of the earlier portion of the Vedic corpus
(culminating with texts called *Brahmanas*), which
chiefly concerns the performance of ritual sacrifice; hence, the school
of thought advanced by Kumarila was also well known as *Karma
Mimamsa* ("hermeneutics of ritual action") or *Adhvara
Mimamsa* ("hermeneutics of sacrifice"). In contrast, *Uttara
Mimamsa* takes its bearings from that portion
of the Vedic corpus that comprises the *Upanisads*, which were
traditionally styled "Vedanta" ("culmination of
the Veda"); indeed, the same word is more familiar to many modern readers as denoting Uttara Mimamsa itself. 

(On relations between these two
traditions of Mimamsa, see the essays in Bronkhorst 2007.)




Just as texts in the many strata of the Vedic corpus mostly represent
themselves as in some sense interpreting the texts that precede them,
so, too, the philosophical tradition of Purva
Mimamsa (henceforth, simply
"Mimamsa"), in this regard typifying the generally scholastic character of first-millennium Indian philosophy, developed in the form of commentaries on the foundational texts of the tradition (and
commentaries on the commentaries, etc.). Mimamsakas, as
adherents of this school are called, thus take their bearings from the
*Mimamsa Sutras* attributed to a
certain Jaimini, who is thought to have flourished near the beginning
of the first millennium ce. The first of Jaimini's
*sutras* ("aphorisms") names "the desire
to know *dharma*"
(*dharmajijnasa*) as the constitutive concern
of Mimamsa, where *dharma* is represented
in early commentary simply as what "connects a person with the
highest good." Among the salient points about the goal thus
commended by Mimamsa's foundational text is
that *dharma*, as here imagined, denotes a constitutively future
state of affairs; *dharma*, Mimamsakas typically
say, is always "yet to be" (*bhavisyat*).




This characterization of *dharma* can be taken to suggest that
it has something to do with post-mortem existence states of affairs, which
were indeed among the expected results of certain Vedic rites.
(Early proponents of Mimamsa differed from most other
Indian philosophical schools in not taking liberation from
*samsara* to be the ultimate desideratum.) The
perennially subjunctive character of talk of *dharma* perhaps
more significantly reflects, however, the view that Vedic injunctions
essentially enjoin the ongoing *bringing into being*
(*bhavana*) of a ritual world that must continually be
renewed; it is insofar as no one ever *finishes* bringing this
world into being that its realization is always still to come. (See, on
this idea, Clooney 1990, 129-161.) Philosophically, the significant
point is that, as always *yet to be realized*, the *summum
bonum* for Mimamsakas is essentially inaccessible
to perception, and only language can be thought to represent a way of
knowing it. This is surely the paramount intuition informing the entire
Mimamsaka project, which centers on confidence in the
epistemic status of Vedic injunctions and the mind-independent reality
of language.


### 1.3 The works of Kumarila as commentaries on foundational texts




Typifying the "sutra" genre of mnemonic concision,
Jaimini's aphorisms are often intelligible only with reference to
commentaries; the earliest of the completely extant commentaries on
Jaimini's sutras is that of Sabara (fl. c. 400 c.e.),
whose commentary (which itself quotes from at least one
no-longer-extant earlier commentary) defines the basic parameters of
the tradition's unfolding. The divergent elaborations of the
Mimamsaka project represented by Kumarila and
Prabhakara are therefore framed, in turn, as commenting on
Sabara's interpretation of the Mimamsa
Sutras. It is typical, then, for passages from
Kumarila's corpus to be cited with reference to the section
of Sabara's commentary from which they depart--which
effectively means that Kumarila's topics can usually be
referred to by the particular sutras of Jaimini upon which
Sabara was himself commenting. So, for example,
Kumarila's elaboration of the *svatah
pramanya* ("immediate justification")
doctrine in epistemology is framed in terms of Sabara's
commentary on Jaimini's "*codana
sutra*"--the sutra, that is, that specifies
that Vedic "injunction" (*codana*) is the only
valid way of knowing *dharma*. References, then, to the passages
in which Kumarila develops his signal epistemological contribution
are typically to the numbered verses of the "*codana
sutra*" chapter of his
*Slokavarttika*.




The latter title names one of four works attributed to Kumarila,
and one of the two most important; it is the
*Slokavarttika* that is typically taken to be of
greatest philosophical significance, and it was surely this work that
was most recurrently engaged by other Indian philosophers. The
*Slokavarttika* is framed by Sabara's
commentary on the beginning of the first chapter of Jaimini's
work--the part of Sabara's commentary traditionally
styled "*Tarkapada*," or the "part
concerning reasoning," wherein Sabara considers as a
preliminary matter questions pertaining to whether Vedic texts
ought in the first place to be thought an epistemically reliable basis
for action. It is thus in the *Slokavarttika*
that Kumarila argues for the epistemological and metaphysical
commitments relevant to the governing claim that the Vedas are uniquely
authoritative for matters of ultimate concern. Typically of the
"*varttika*" genre of commentary,
Kumarila's "commentary" often significantly
revises or elaborates on the thoughts advanced in Sabara's
text, and the novelty of some of Kumarila's arguments is
therefore often clear. Typically, as well, of the inter-traditionally
contested period in which he wrote, the epistemological and other
arguments of the *Slokavarttika* generally involve
Kumarila's heavily engaging rival Indian schools of thought
and showing their alternative positions to fail as defeaters. While the
arguments are in the service of claims (such as that the Vedas are
eternal) that are unlikely to be attractive to modern readers, this
text is often a model of philosophical subtlety and sophistication.




The philosophically rich *Slokavarttika* can be
understood, however, as a prolegomenon to the real, hermeneutical
business of Mimamsa, which is most significantly
advanced in Kumarila's *Tantravarttika*. Framed
as a commentary on the remainder of Sabara's chapter 1
through his chapter 3, this massive work addresses questions raised by
the different kinds of sentences to be found in the Vedas, the status
of Brahmanical literature that is not part of the Vedic corpus, and all
manner of grammatical and metaphysical issues pertaining to the
performance of Vedic ritual as that is enjoined by sometimes
interpretively obscure Vedic texts. In this under-studied text, then,
there is much to be learned about Kumarila's highly ramified
philosophy of language, as well as about the ideological and practical
particulars of the ritualistic Vedic worldview. In addition to the
*Slokavarttika* and the *Tantravarttika*,
Kumarila authored the *Tuptika*, which
comments on the remaining balance of Sabara's commentary;
and the no-longer-extant *Brhattika*,
whose extensive treatment of many of the concerns of the
*Slokavarttika* is recoverable from the large parts of
it that are preserved in the Buddhist
Santaraksita's *Tattvasamgraha* (see
Frauwallner 1962).


## 2. Epistemology: Direct realism and the doctrine of immediate justification


### 2.1 Early Mimamsakas on the epistemic status of Vedic testimony




It is relevant to begin with Kumarila's characteristic
epistemological doctrine not only because this is widely thought to be among his most characteristic philosophical contributions, but also
because Kumarila appeals to the epistemological intuitions
elaborated in this doctrine in arguing, as well, for a great many of
his other claims; indeed, the commonsense realism reflected in
Kumarila's epistemology represents a useful way into his overall
philosophical project, which is shot through with essentially realist
commitments. Thus, for example, Kumarila was strongly critical of
the doctrine of *svasamvitti*
("self-awareness"), which is arguably foundational for the
Buddhists Dignaga and Dharmakirti; it is particularly
insofar as that doctrine figures in a generally representationalist
epistemology--one that is to be understood as part of a larger
Buddhist case for epistemic and perhaps even metaphysical
idealism--that Kumarila will have no truck with the idea,
instead affirming that what we are immediately aware of is just the
ordinary objects we typically *take* ourselves to be aware of.
Kumarila's guiding intuition, then, is that we are generally
justified in taking awareness as veridically disclosing precisely the
kind of world it *seems* to us to disclose.




Kumarila's development of a comprehensive epistemological
orientation along these lines is occasioned by Sabara's
commentary on the second of Jaimini's
*Mimamsa Sutras*. So, having announced
in the first sutra that the "desire to know
*dharma*" is the constitutive concern of
Mimamsa, Jaimini then says in the second
sutra that "*dharma* is a goal defined by [Vedic]
injunction (*codana*)"--that, in other words,
what is epistemically authoritative with respect to what
Mimamsakas take to be the *summum bonum* is just
the texts of the Vedas (and more precisely, those injunctive passage
that enjoin the execution of particular ritual acts). This amounts to
the generally epistemological claim that among the various ways of
knowing available to us, the linguistic items that are Vedic texts
uniquely represent "reliable epistemic warrants"
(*pramana*) with regard to *dharma*.




Indian philosophers, particularly under the influence of the Nyaya
tradition of thought (and of the appropriation and systematization of
its main terms of art by the Buddhists Dignaga and
Dharmakirti), were generally preoccupied by Kumarila's
time with the issue of *pramanas*--with the
question of which doxastic practices (perception, inference, testimony,
etc.) should be reckoned as "epistemic criteria" or
"reliable doxastic practices" (as we might render
*pramana*), and with characterizing the criteria so
identified. Mimamsa's Buddhist opponents
characteristically affirmed, in this regard, that only perception and
inference had this status, and that all other ways of arriving at
beliefs were somehow reducible to one of these. Proponents of
Mimamsa chiefly affirmed, in contrast, not
only that there is an irreducibly and distinctively *linguistic*
way of knowing, but indeed that it is this (and not perception) that
should be understood as most significant. For while it is in
the nature of perception to bear only on actually present states of
affairs--the salient point of Jaimini's fourth sutra,
on perception, is that this consists in the kind of sensory cognition
had *when there is contact with something present*
(*satsamprayoge*)--language alone has the capacity
to engender awareness of future, or "to-be-realized"
(*bhavya*), states of affairs. Insofar, then, as the
*dharma* that Mimamsakas are most interested in
is just such a state of affairs, the fact of perception's bearing
only on what is (as it were) ready-to-hand is to be reckoned a
deficiency. The epistemological project for proponents of this school
thus becomes that of making sense of the unique epistemic authority of
the kinds of Vedic injunctions (paradigmatically, "one desirous
of heaven should perform the *agnihotra* sacrifice") that
would not fare well on any account that instead privileged
perception.




To that end, Kumarila's predecessor Sabara argued that
linguistic utterances *engender some cognition*
(*avabodhayati*), and that as long as the idea thus engendered
is clear or "determinate" (*niscita*), one is
entitled to accept it as a basis for action. Of a sentence such as
"one desirous of heaven should perform a sacrifice," then,
Sabara would mainly ask:  *do you understand the
sentence*? If not, then the sentence is reasonably disregarded
owing to its engendering an essentially doubtful
(*samdigdham*) cognition; but insofar as the sentence
makes an epistemically contentful claim, we are entitled to judge the
*prima facie* unambiguous cognition thus brought about to be
false only if it is explicitly *falsified*--only if we have, that is, knowledge to the effect that someone has *not* gone
to heaven as a result of having performed the *agnihotra*
sacrifice. Determinately contentful linguistic cognitions that have not
been falsified are reasonably taken, then, as bases for action.


### 2.2 Kumarila's development of a general epistemological doctrine




Despite, however, Sabara's probably warranted confidence
that his interlocutors could never be in a position to *show*
that sentences regarding the post-mortem careers of Vedic practitioners
are falsified, the burden of proof will surely be thought by most to
remain on him. It is at this point, though, that Kumarila more
convincingly shifted, in effect, the burden of proof. His
ground-breaking approach to epistemology involves raising a
second-order question about the doxastic practices we take to be
reliable (about, that is, *pramanas*). Of any way of
knowing, then, that might be thought relevant to the adjudication of a
claim such as Sabara's (and Kumarila recognized that it
is strategically advantageous in this regard to focus especially on
perception), Kumarila asks:  does it have its status
*as* epistemically reliable--does it have, as
Kumarila puts it, its *pramanya*, or
"being
a *pramana*"--"intrinsically"
(*svatah*), or does it have this property only on account of something else (*paratah*)? What
Kumarila thus asks is whether any cognition's having the
epistemic qualities in virtue of which it is to be reckoned a reliable
warrant--truth-conduciveness, say, or the capacity to confer
justification--is something that obtains *immediately*, or
whether instead justification is necessarily mediated by one's having
higher-order reasons for confidence in one's first-order
cognitions.




The *locus classicus* for Kumarila's argument here
is verse 47 of the *codana sutra* chapter of the
*Slokavarttika*:  "It should be understood
that all *pramanas*' have the property of
being *pramanas* intrinsically; for a capacity not
already existing by itself (*svatah*) cannot be produced
by anything else." (All of the passages given here from
Kumarila and his commentators can be found in Arnold 2005,
57-114.) The argument Kumarila concisely expresses here in
verse form is straightforward but compelling: if it is thought that
any cognition finally counts as a reliable warrant only insofar as it
can be demonstrated to be such (for example, by appeal to a subsequent
cognition of the causes of the initial one), infinite regress ensues;
for the subsequent, justifying cognition would, as itself a cognition,
similarly require justification, and so on. Or, as Kumarila here
suggests, if the initial cognition isn't credited with the
intrinsic "capacity" for conferring justification, then no
further cognition could be able to bestow that, either--unless,
of course, the further cognition is itself credited with immediately
having that capacity, in which case, why not simply allow this with
respect to the initial cognition? As Kumarila's
commentators like to put it, if it is thought that we must await
second-order justification before thinking we are justified in
crediting first-order cognitions, then "the whole world would be
blind."




Among Kumarila's guiding intuitions here is the commonsensical
thought that radical skepticism is not a tenable idea--that, in
other words, it is to be presumed that we
*are*, simply as a matter of empirical fact, already justified
in believing a great deal, and that the task of epistemology is
therefore to consider what must be the case in order for that to make sense.
The thrust of Kumarila's argument can be brought out by
briefly contrasting this epistemological position with what
Mimamsakas not unreasonably took to be the
characteristically Buddhist position in this regard (with its being
particularly the thought of Buddhists like Dignaga and
Dharmakirti that Mimamsakas targeted with their epistemological arguments). Against the kind of
common-sense realism exemplified by proponents of
Mimamsa, these Buddhists were inclined to
encourage wariness with regard to our ordinary epistemic intuitions;
Buddhists, after all, are chiefly concerned to argue that we are
mistaken in inferring (what is perhaps among our most unshakable
convictions) that our manifestly episodic cognitions are the states of
an underlying *self*. To that end, Buddhists like Dignaga
and Dharmakirti privileged what they took to be the constitutively
nonconceptual, *perceptual* awareness that ultimately discloses,
they take it, only fleeting particulars. Dharmakirti's
intuition in this regard was that it is especially in virtue of the
causally describable character of perception that it is thus to be
privileged, since on his view, the capacity to interact causally with
other particulars is what distinguishes anything as *really
existent*. (This intuition means, among other things, that
Buddhists would also attack the strong linguistic realism of
Mimamsakas, since the kinds of abstract objects posited
to make sense of language cannot be thought to have causal
efficacy.)




In characterizing what he takes to be the Buddhist position with regard
to the issues we are here scouting following Kumarila, the later
Mimamsaka commentator Parthasarathimisra
invokes these central commitments of Dharmakirti to motivate a
case for the direction of explanation that Mimamsakas
would reverse:  "Since we see that there is cognition of
a jar that is sometimes based on a jar, and sometimes *not*
based on a jar, a jar cannot be ascertained only by that [i.e., only by
a cognition that seems to us to have a jar as its content].
Accordingly, it must be ascertained that the arising of a cognition of
a jar really is based on a jar only after ascertainment that there is a
jar which really exists as the cause of that cognition, [which
ascertainment can be] based only on perception of pragmatic
efficacy." This credibly represents Buddhists in the tradition of
Dignaga and Dharmakirti as holding that we reach epistemic
bedrock only when we have "cognition whose phenomenal content is
pragmatic efficacy" (*arthakriyanirbhasam
jnanam*)--that, in other words, it is reasonable
to doubt whether things really are as represented in cognition until we
have arrived at the kind of awareness that is causally related to what
it is of (as, for example, when one not only sees that there is a jar,
but actually *carries water* with it).




That is what it might look like to suppose, against
the Mimamsakas, that the status of first-order
cognitions *as* epistemically reliable should be thought to
require demonstration with reference to something over and above the
initial cognitions. Against this, Kumarila argues that the problem with
such an appeal is that the second-order awareness *that* the
thing perceived is pragmatically efficacious is itself just another
cognition. Kumarila would allow, then, that a subsequent
cognition concerning pragmatic efficacy could count as a potential
source of falsification; the impossibility of carrying water with what
had seemed to be a jar would indeed count as overriding the previously
justified belief that one had seen a jar. What he refuses, however, is the
claim that the cognition of pragmatic efficacy provides a fundamentally
different *kind* of justification than the initial cognition.
Confidence, to the contrary, that pragmatic efficacy *does*
provide something more--that it tells us, e.g., that an
initially *justified* belief is also *true*--could
only be based on the presupposition that "pragmatic
efficacy" is somehow more immediately available to awareness
than, say, a jar; but this begs precisely the question at issue, and
Kumarila can not unreasonably ask why the Buddhist is willing to
credit the second-order cognition as intrinsically valid, but not the
first.


### 2.3 The significance of falsification for Kumarila's doctrine




It is important to appreciate the extent to which Kumarila's
epistemology involves essentially *phenomenological*
considerations about the credibility of cognition. He says in this
regard (at *codana* verse 53) that "the epistemic
reliability of cognition is obtained just by virtue of its consisting
of cognition"--that, in other words, it is simply in the
nature of contentful awareness to make an epistemic claim on the
subject thereof, and that these claims are to be suspended or set aside
only when specifically countervailing cognitions are forthcoming.
Moreover, one typically does not go *seeking* knowledge that
one's first-order cognitions are false; rather, it is only when
*presented* with overriding cognitions--cognitions,
Kumarila says, typically brought about "effortlessly," i.e.,
without any ostensibly justificatory search on the part of the
subject--that one sometimes finds it necessary to revise one's
judgments. Kumarila does not propose, then, that one must first
consider and rule out all possible defeaters before arriving at
conviction; the point, rather, is that one's judgment is justified
until and unless some specifically overriding cognition happens to be
forthcoming.




An account of the possible overriding of prima facie justified beliefs
turns out, then, to be integral to Kumarila's epistemology.
One might, in this regard, worry that on the view he thus proposes,
second-order cognitions of defeaters end up themselves having a
privileged status; that is, Kumarila might be thought to credit
"overriding cognitions"
(*badhakajnana*) with a capacity for effecting
epistemic closure such as he does not allow for the initial cognitions
thus overridden (which, as with scientific hypotheses for Popper, are
taken as never able to provide any definitive epistemic
closure). Thus, for example, it could be supposed that one might just
as well conclude, from the fact that two contradictory cognitions have
arisen, that the *second* one is suspect--and that it
would therefore be unwarrantedly privileging "overriding"
cognitions to suppose that second-order cognitions *ipso facto*
count as evidence of the falsity of the prior cognitions on which they
bear. Here, though, it matters that Kumarila's account
involves essentially phenomenological considerations; his point is
just that a subsequent cognition calls for the revision of a preceding
one *only* *if it seems to a subject to do so*. Thus, to
have some prima facie justified belief subsequently called into
question *just is* for the subsequent cognition to present
itself as having, phenomenologically, the force of overriding the
preceding; if that is not how the second awareness seems, then its
phenomenological content will not *be* that of an overriding
cognition in the first place, and it therefore will not present itself
to the subject thereof as undermining any already-held belief.




It might also be worried that Kumarila's account of
falsification leaves the epistemic process infinitely open, with
something like an infinite regress of potential revisions--that
we could never be entitled, on this account, to claim anything like
*knowledge*. Regarding this line of objection,
 Kumarila
 and his
commentators finally fall back on an appeal to common sense, urging
that it is unreasonable to encourage doubt where no specific cognition
of any deficiencies explicitly raises one; otherwise, as the
commentator Sucaritamisra puts it, "there would be the
unwanted consequence of annihilating all worldly discourse." The
Mimamsakas thus take it that skeptical concerns can
reasonably be pressed only so far, and that if it is thought that we
are entitled only to those beliefs that have been decisively secured
against all such doubts, then it would turn out that we know very
little indeed. This thought reflects, again, Kumarila's
commonsense realism, according to which it is beyond doubt that we
*do* know a great deal, and that any epistemology according to
which that turns out to be problematic is, *ipso facto*, to be
thought suspect.


### 2.4 Alternative interpretations of Kumarila's epistemology




The foregoing reading, on which Kumarila's
characteristic epistemological doctrine centrally involves the claim
that phenomenologically determinate cognitions immediately confer
*prima facie justification*, is informed by one of a couple of
significant lines of traditional interpretation of Kumarila's
texts; in particular, this reflects the interpretation of the
commentator Parthasarathimisra, which is arguably
preferable both in terms of its exegetical adequacy to Kumarila,
and in terms of its philosophical cogency. (See, however, McCrea 2018 for a different perspective on the matter.) There is, however, an
alternative line of interpretation to be gleaned from the commentary
of Kumarila's near-contemporary Umveka Bhatta
(whose commentary is referred to in the Buddhist
Santaraksita's engagements with Kumarila). Among
the salient points of Umveka's reading is the worry that
Kumarila cannot, as has so far been suggested, have meant to
argue that *all* phenomenologically credible cognitions are to
be credited with being truth-conducive; seemingly counter, then, to
Kumarila's own suggestion (quoted above) that "the validity
of cognition is obtained just by virtue of its consisting of
cognition," Umveka notes that the fact of "being a
cognition" (*bodhakatva*) commonly characterizes both
veridical and erroneous cognitions.




Umveka worries, then, that if Kumarila is understood as
saying that a cognition's being truth-conducive follows simply
from its *being* a cognition, there would be the unwanted
consequence that if one mistook the glint of mother-of-pearl for that
of a piece of silver (a stock example of error in Indian philosophy),
this erroneous cognition would have to be credited as a
"veridical cognition" (*pramana*). (It
matters for this discussion that the word *pramana*
is equivocal, alternately referring to reliable doxastic practices, and
to episodes of *veridical cognition* such as result from the
exercise thereof.) Umveka's intuition, then, is that
"being a *pramana*" can only
characterize, as it were, the certified *outcome* of the
epistemic process; he is therefore concerned to interpret
Kumarila's doctrine in such a way that "being
intrinsically truth-conducive" ends up being predicated only of
what are clearly *veridical* cognitions.




To that end, Umveka urges that Kumarila be understood as
arguing that what produces the truth-conduciveness intrinsic to some
cognitions just is the *causes* of those cognitions that are
veridical--that, in other words, the point of Kumarila's
characteristic claim is that the truth-conduciveness of any
cognition *originates* intrinsically, arising from the same
causal factors in virtue of which it is rightly said to be
veridical. With respect, then, to Kumarila's claim
(at *codana* 47) that "a capacity not already
existing by itself cannot be produced by anything else,"
Umveka glosses Kumarila's "by anything else" as
suggesting that a cognition's capacity for truth-conduciveness cannot
be produced *by anything over and above the causal factors
relevant to cognition*. From the perspective of an interpretation informed by Parthasarathimisra, it thus seems that Umveka retains precisely the idea
Kumarila means to call into question, which is that veridical
cognitions can be distinguished particularly with reference to the
causes thereof; for on Umveka's view, what distinguishes a
veridical cognition of silver from mistaking mother-of-pearl for
such is the fact that in the former case alone, silver really is
present as the
*cause* of the cognition. Umveka thus takes it that what
immediately or "intrinsically" attaches to cognitions is to
be understood not in terms of what may be the case *prima facie*
(not in terms of how cognitions may at first *appear*), but in
terms of what we end up with. The status of truth-conducive cognitions
*as* truth-conducive, then, is understood as by Umveka as "intrinsic" only in the sense that this status results from the same causes that give rise to the cognitions so characterized--which means we can determine which cognitions *those* are by identifying the relevant causes.




In contrast to this interpretation of Kumarila, the
eleventh-century commentator
Parthasarathimisra--who also wrote an independent
essay on the doctrine here in view
(entitled *Svatahpramanyanirnaya*,
"Ascertainment of Intrinsic Validity"; see A. Subrahmanya
Shastri 1982, Arnold 2002)--embraced just the view that
Umveka thought so problematic. Parthasarathimisra emphasizes that it was
precisely Kumarila's point to argue that *all*
phenomenologically credible cognitions--all cognitions, that is,
that first present themselves as candidates for the status of reliable
epistemic warrants--should be thought intrinsically or
immediately to have that status. This is, on one view of the matter, because
Parthasarathimisra takes the fact of any cognition's
"being truth-conducive"
(*pramanya*) essentially to concern not
*truth*, but *justification*--not, that is, the
*outcome* of the epistemic process, but what gets it off the
ground in the first place. Kumarila's reference, then, to
the "capacity" that cognitions immediately have in this
regard is to be understood as a capacity *for* *conferring
justification*--a thought that
Parthasarathimisra expresses by saying he takes
Kumarila's doctrine to affirm (against Umveka) not
that this status intrinsically *exists* (*bhavati*), but
that it intrinsically "appears" (*bhati*). The
point of departure on this understanding of Kumarila, then, is the
kind of epistemic claim that any cognition *seems to a subject*
to make upon him.




Among the points Parthasarathimisra adduces in favor of
this interpretation is that Umveka cannot make sense of the
account of falsification that figures in Kumarila's
elaboration of his epistemology. On the reading of
Kumarila's epistemology proposed by Umveka,
Parthasarathi says, Kumarila would have to be understood
as claiming, with regard to cognitions that turn out to be overridden,
that their *truth*-status had changed. In other words, on the
view that "being truth-conducive"
(*pramanya*) is intrinsically *produced*
(i.e., by the same causes that produce the cognition), any subsequent
revision in judgment would have to consist in the actual transformation
of the initially known state of affairs--what had been
*true*, that is, would now be false. Against this,
Parthasarathimisra urges that "this doesn't
make sense, because of [the cognition's having been]
non-veridical from the outset." This rejoinder virtually amounts
to the statement of a realist conception of truth:  in cases where
our initial cognition is overridden, the initial cognition was false
all along; all that changes is *our awareness* thereof.
Parthasarathi thus separates the (subjective, epistemic)
state of *justification* from the (objective) fact of
*truth*, and clarifies that what is intrinsic to cognition has
to do with the former. This is why Parthasarathi can
coherently take the whole doctrine of intrinsic validity precisely to
*depend* on what Umveka took to be an unwanted
consequence:  its being *all* determinately contentful
cognitions that can reasonably be assumed immediately to confer
justification.




On this reading, then, Kumarila's doctrine is to be
understood as holding that it is characteristic of contentful
cognitions *immediately* to confer justification, with the
mediation of higher-order cognitions capable not of conferring anything
essentially different in kind, but only of calling for revision. If,
absent the arising of any overriding cognition, the prima facie
justification holds, then the initial cognition stands as veridical
*in virtue of the fact that it was truth-conducive*--in
virtue of the fact, as Parthasarathi puts this point, that
"being truth-conducive" (*pramanya*)
is the "motivator of the concept and the word
'*pramana*'"
(*pramanabuddhisabdayor bhavakataya*).
This effectively reverses the direction of explanation favored by
Umveka, who is instead concerned to argue that the status of
being truth-conducive is *caused* by the same factors that cause
veridical cognitions.




If it seems like settling for less thus to argue, with
Parthasarathi, that defeasible justification is all that can
be yielded by our epistemic practices, he can rejoin by asking whether it could make sense to want anything more
than that; what could it look like, epistemically, not only to be
*justified* in holding a belief, but also to know it is
*true*? In fact, this is already just what one is entitled to
think in virtue of being justified, and it is hard to imagine what
sense it could make to think we might be, with respect to any
particular belief, in a better epistemic position than already
*entitled to think it true*. Indeed, it is arguably just the
point of Kumarila's epistemology thus to challenge the
intuition that "knowing" could only consist in knowing
*that* one knows. Just, then, as with the influential efforts
of contemporary "reformed epistemologists" to undermine
the threat of "evidentialist" challenges (see, especially,
Alston 1991, as well as Arnold 2005), Kumarila's epistemology
amounts to a critique of empiricist foundationalism--one that
gets its purchase largely by showing that the foundationalist impulse
ends up leading to intractable skeptical problems such as can only be
foreclosed by an appeal to common sense.


## 3. Metaphysics and philosophy of language


### 3.1 On the eternality of the Vedas, and of language in general




Of course, there are, in addition to the foregoing philosophical
considerations in favor of Kumarila's epistemology,
specifically Mimamsaka concerns driving the project. In
this regard, Parthasarathi has a particularly cogent point in
favor of the interpretation on which Kumarila has, as suggested
above, effectively reversed the standard order of epistemological
explanation. Thus, Parthasarathi urges that
Mimamsakas *cannot* proceed on the assumption
that Kumarila meant to ask about the status only of
*pramanas* (i.e., only of those cognitions that are
already known to be veridical); for that would effectively disqualify
the Vedas from coming under the purview of this discussion, since
Mimamsa's opponents will not grant that the
Vedas count as epistemically reliable (as a
*pramana*) in the first place. Indeed, whether or not
we are entitled to think the Vedas epistemically reliable is *just
the issue in question*; it would therefore be to little avail to
ask how it is simply that cognitions already known to be reliable have
the status they do, since it must first be established that Vedic
injunction is a rational basis for action in the first place. And the
only way to further this goal, Parthasarathi argues, is to
show that *all* contentful cognitions (even those that turn out
not to have been veridical) should be recognized as immediately
conferring justification. Aptly expressing the reversed direction of
epistemological explanation commended by this interpretation, William
Alston has asked to similar effect: if a subject
"were not often really perceiving X why should the experience
involved provide justification for beliefs about X?" (1991: 10)
Similarly, Parthasarathi can ask: if it were not really the
case that one desirous of heaven should perform a Vedic sacrifice, then
why (as this epistemological program is concerned to show) would the
experience of a Vedic injunction to that effect provide justification
for that belief?




On the view, then, that Kumarila's doctrine reverses the
usual order of epistemological explanation, the claim is that insofar
as any cognition engendered by a Vedic injunction intrinsically confers
justification simply in virtue of its *being* a cognition, Vedic
injunction first becomes a candidate for the status of "reliable
doxastic practice" (*pramana*)--and the
point of Kumarila's epistemology is that this is a status
that any reliable doxastic practice should then be thought to enjoy
until or unless it is overridden. Here, though, is where other
characteristically Mimamsaka commitments significantly
come into play--chiefly, the commitment to the view that the
Vedic texts are, like language itself, eternal or primordial.
Jaimini's fifth *Mimamsa Sutra*
specifies in this regard that "the relations between words and
their referents are primordial (*autpattika*)"--a
view meant to underwrite the claim that the Vedas themselves are
transcendent or "impersonal" (*apauruseya*).
It is, then, particularly together with this view that
Kumarila's epistemology can be taken to warrant the
Mimamsaka claim that the Vedas are, in fact,
*uniquely* authoritative; for insofar as they are thus taken
essentially to transcend any human perspective, Vedic injunctions,
uniquely among reliable doxastic practices, therefore *cannot*
be falsified.




That the claims expressed by or implicit in Vedic texts cannot be
falsified has to do with the distinctive capacity of language to bear
on imperceptible states of affairs such as are not ready to hand, but
always "going to be realized" (*bhavya* or
*bhavisyat*). Thus, to the extent that any linguistic
episode reflects or expresses something of the epistemic perspective of
a particular language-user, the claim it makes is always such as can be
overridden based on considerations involving that limited epistemic
perspective--based, e.g., on the speaker's mendacity, or
on his reporting a perceptual or inferential claim that turns out
itself to be mistaken. *Language itself*, however, is not thus
limited by any particular perspective; to the extent, then, that one
joins Mimamsakas (as Heidegger sometimes seems to do!)
in finding intelligible the idea that *language itself* might,
as it were, utter the Vedas, the fact of there being no epistemically
limited author whose intentions the Vedas would express means there
can, in this case alone, be no basis for overriding the claims that
issue from these texts. (That Mimamsakas argued
strenuously against Buddhist and Jaina claims about the possible
cultivation of omniscience reflects the stake they thus had in denying
that there could be any epistemically unlimited perspective;
*language as such*, in contrast to such individual knowers as
the Buddha and the Jina, is not itself a limiting perspective.)




It is important to note (what is sometimes overlooked) that the
foregoing claims about the eternality of language and of the Vedas are
logically independent of the epistemological position Kumarila has
elaborated; the epistemological doctrine of "immediate
justification" does not, that is, by itself support the claim
that the Vedas are uniquely authoritative. While Kumarila's
epistemology may, then, by itself show that Vedic texts are
*justifiably* credited as epistemically reliable (that, in other
words, Mimamsaka beliefs are *rationally held*),
it is logically independent claims about the eternality of the Vedas
that are taken by Mimamsakas to warrant the stronger
conclusion that Vedic injunctions are *uniquely* so. It is
important to appreciate the independence of these positions from one
another, and accordingly to note that the assessment of
Kumarila's epistemology (both traditionally and among modern
scholars) is sometimes driven more by resistance to the eternality
claim than to anything integral to Kumarila's
epistemology.




Thus, for example, the tenth-century Nyaya thinker Jayanta
Bhatta--who was himself much influenced by the
thought of Kumarila, and who was inclined to cede to
Mimamsakas authority in hermeneutical
matters--was worried, as a theist, about Kumarila's
epistemological case for the authoritative status of the
Vedas. Jayanta thought Kumarila's defense of the Vedas
problematic, however, chiefly insofar as Kumarila's epistemology
dovetails with claims about the eternality of the Vedas, thus making
for an essentially *atheistic* case for the eternality of the
Vedas. So, while Nyaya thinkers like Jayanta characteristically
held that authorship of the Vedas is to be attributed to
*isvara*, "God," Kumarila's
defense *of the eternality of language* involves critiques of
theism that are, indeed, very much like some characteristically
Buddhist critiques of theism. (On this, see Krasser 1999.) But while
Kumarila's epistemological doctrine is clearly meant to
dovetail with these other commitments to secure a unique epistemic
status for the Vedas, the claimed eternality of language (and the
consequent critique of theism) is not itself a point that is advanced
by Kumarila's epistemological case for the immediately
justificatory status of contentful cognitions; indeed, that there is
nothing intrinsically anti-theistic about his epistemology is suggested
by the fact that William Alston (1991) has elaborated a strikingly
similar epistemology precisely in order to show specifically
*theistic* practices to be justified. To the extent, then, that
Jayanta attacks Kumarila's epistemology chiefly by pressing
the point that it is problematic to suppose there could be authorless
texts (as, for example, in his philosophical play
*Agamadambara*; see Dezso 2005, 213-17), it should
be recognized that he misses the mark.




Despite the importance of thus distinguishing these two moments in
Kumarila's case for Vedic authority--the
*epistemological* moment, that is, and the case for the
essentially transcendent character of the Vedas--it should be
allowed that Mimamsaka commitments regarding the
eternality of language in general (and of the Vedas in particular) are
hardly incidental to their overall position. While, however, few modern
readers are likely to be favorably inclined towards the view that the
Vedic texts are authorless, these commitments reflect often profound
intuitions, elaborated by Kumarila and other
Mimamsakas, about the irreducibly linguistic character
of thought, and about the reality of the kinds of universals that must
be posited to make sense of the objectivity of language. Arguing, in
this regard, for the eternality of language, Kumarila challenged
(chiefly Buddhist and Nyaya) proponents of contract- or
convention-theories of linguistic origins to explain how any
*particular* linguistic act could coherently be imagined as
the *first* such act. The problem he raises is that any
particular linguistic act is intelligible *as* a linguistic
act--intelligible, that is, *as* instituting linguistic
policies--only given the prior understanding that the
meaning-creating utterance itself *means* something. One person
could, that is, propose to another that (for example) this thing here
be called a 'cow' only by *telling* her
so--but the possibility of his doing so is just what we are in
this case trying to explain.




Kumarila can be said in this regard to share Wittgenstein's
famously expressed intuition about the problem with Augustine's
account of language-acquisition. With regard to Augustine's contention that language-learning is explicable in terms of foundational moments of deictic usage, Wittgenstein says that "Augustine describes the
learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country
and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it
already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child
could already *think*, only not yet speak. And
'think' would here mean something like 'talk to
itself'." (Wittgenstein 1958, SS32) Kumarila can
be taken similarly to have urged, in pressing his case for the
eternality of language, that we can only imagine *thinking* to
consist in "talking to oneself"--and that to
understand *that* is to understand something more than just
*what things are called*. What Kumarila challenges his
Nyaya and Buddhist opponents to explain, then, is where we get the
very idea of *meaning*  something, and in what that
consists.




Kumarila thus argues that the irreducible *givenness* of
language--its always already being there--is a condition
of the possibility of there being any particular speech acts, and of
any *thought* such as might explain these. Particularly as
against the essentially psychologistic account of language to be
gleaned from the Buddhist Dharmakirti, Kumarila's view
can be understood to credit something of the irreducibly social
character of language, which is to be understood on this view as having
an essentially mind-independent reality; the possibility of
*meaning* anything cannot be explained with reference to the
goings-on in *any particular minds*. It might reasonably be
said, then, that while Dharmakirti's *apoha* doctrine
amounts to a paradigm case of what V. N. Volosinov characterized as
"individualistic subjectivism," Kumarila's
account paradigmatically exemplifies the alternative pole that
Volosinov characterized as "abstract objectivism." (On
these arguments, see Arnold 2006, and 2012, Chapter 4; Taber
[forthcoming]. See, as well, Volosinov 1986, 45-63.)


### 3.2 On the reality of linguistic universals




It is important to note, with respect to Kumarila's
characteristically Mimamsaka intuitions about language,
that the word *sabda*--which often means
"word," as in the fifth of Jaimini's
*Mimamsa Sutras*, where it is
relations between *sabda* and referents (*artha*)
that are said to be primordial--is essentially ambiguous between
what Saussure distinguished as *langue* and *parole*.
Thus, the same word can also refer generally to
"sound," in the sense denoting any object of the
auditory sense faculty. To that extent, *sabda* can be
understood as referring either to *language as such*
(Saussure's *langue*), or to particular, temporally describable
occasions of linguistic utterance (Saussure's
*parole*). It thus becomes clear that arguments for thinking that
*sabda* is eternal will seem rather different depending on
which of these senses one takes to be in play. Buddhists, especially
insofar as they are typically apt to focus on particular occasions of
use, find it obviously true that (as on one favored Buddhist example of
a formally stated inference) "*sabda* is impermanent,
because it is produced," just like artifacts like jars (which we
know to be both produced on particular occasions, and essentially
impermanent). The Buddhist claim is less obviously compelling, however, if instead
one takes it that *sabda* denotes always already available
conditions of the possibility of any particular utterance's
counting *as* linguistic.




Still, while it is surely appropriate thus to credit
Kumarila's arguments for the eternality of language with
capturing profound insights regarding our linguistic being, the case
for his account of the eternality of language is greatly complicated by
the fact that Kumarila actually holds, in a way, that it is in
*both* of the foregoing senses of the word that
*sabda* should be understood as eternal; on his view, that
is, it is not only linguistic universals that are timeless, but also
*the phonemes that manifest these*. This view reflects, no
doubt, characteristically Mimamsaka commitments,
centering on the category of *mantra*, about the
Vedas--commitments, in particular, about the inherent power not
only of language as such, but of properly uttered Sanskrit sentences
to
*bring into being* the states of affairs they concern. Many
Brahmanical texts preserve, in this regard, a famous story of the
significance of precise transmission of the text:  wishing, by
uttering the nominal compound *Indra\*ndash;satru* (which could
mean "conqueror of Indra"), to make his son triumphant, the
mythical figure of Tvastar instead ensured his son's
death by pronouncing the compound so that it had the sense of an
adjectival, *bahuvrihi* compound ("having Indra as
conqueror")--with the latter state of affairs then brought
into being by his utterance.




It is perhaps insofar as he was attuned to such a view of the
significance of Vedic language that Kumarila was apt to eschew
typically holistic understandings of meaning, and instead to hold the
kind of atomistic view on which individual phonemes can be thought part
of what is eternal about language. Kumarila was, in this regard,
critical of the Sanskrit grammarians' *sphota*
("bursting forth") theory of meaning, which had been
elaborated precisely to account for the expression of meaning in light
of the manifestly *temporal* character of linguistic utterance.
The considerations here in play are not unlike those that preoccupied
Husserl in his *On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time* (1991); just, then, as Husserl was led to venture
that the seemingly instantaneous present of consciousness must somehow
comprise something of the past and future if we are to account for
things like the musical experience of melody, so, too, Sanskritic
thinkers had wondered how to account for the dawning of
*meaning* relative to the necessarily temporal unfolding of any
sentence one could encounter. At the moment, for example, when the last
phoneme of a sentence is uttered, the initial phonemes are no longer
present; at what point, then, are we to say that the sentence's
*meaning* is experienced, and how are we to account for that
with regard to the necessarily vanished moments that are involved?




While proponents of the *sphota* (or "bursting
forth") theory had urged that we must, in this regard, posit the
sudden dawning of something akin to a unitary *proposition*
(which might, indeed, be taken as the sense of the word
*sphota* in this context), Kumarila instead argued
that understanding--whether of *sentences*, or just of
individual *words*--can be explained with reference to
memory of discrete phonemes, and that reference to anything over and
above the phonemes was therefore unnecessary. Similarly, Kumarila
eschewed the holistic account of sentence-meaning--called
*anvitabhidhanavada*, the doctrine that a
sentence is "the expressed meaning of a series [of words]"
(per Brough, 1953, 416)--advanced by Prabhakara, who
would argue that complete sentences represent the basic unit of
meaning. Instead, Kumarila held the so-called
*abhihitanvayavada* doctrine--the view that a
sentence is "a series of expressed word-meanings" (Brough,
416)--on which sentence-meaning is essentially analyzable in
terms of word-meanings that are independently intelligible. Against,
then, the kind of holistic view on which the sense of a word is to be
known chiefly from substitution in sentences, Kumarila argued
(just as he had against the *sphota* theory) that
"as the words are uttered in a sentence, each word performs its
task of expressing its meaning, and the sentence is the summation of
these meanings." (Brough, 415; see, as well, Kunjunni Raja
1963, Matilal 1990, Siderits 1991.)




While such atomistic views might not be judged very promising, and
while they are not obviously required by (and may even seem in tension
with) such intuitions as that language essentially transcends
individual occasions of use, they fit well with Kumarila's
additional commitment to thinking that the phonemes of Vedic Sanskrit
are part of what is eternal in language--though it is surely
difficult to imagine how something as eminently temporal as
*sound* could thus be reckoned as in any sense
*timeless*. Notwithstanding his counter-intuitive commitment to
eternally existent phonemes, Kumarila was also an uncompromising
realist about more clearly abstract universals, taking it, for example,
that the referents of kind-terms are real properties such as *being
a cow*. (See Scharf 1996.) This comes through not only in
Kumarila's philosophy of language, but also in his
epistemology; against, then, Buddhists who argued (with Dignaga
and Dharmakirti) that perception is essentially non-conceptual,
Kumarila firmly held that *perceptions*, properly speaking,
immediately yield justified beliefs regarding things *as* the
kinds of things they are; that perception thus discloses things
*under some description* shows, among other things, that the
kinds of conceptual items that figure in descriptions are real.




One can really *see*, that is, not only particular bovine
critters, but also the fact of their exemplifying *go-tva*, the
property of "being a cow"; this is just what it means to
perceive any such particular *as* *a cow*. This is among
the points regarding which Kumarila found it apt to deploy the
epistemological doctrine of immediate justification; thus, among the
reasons why it cannot reasonably be denied that properties like
*being a cow* are real is that there is nothing that finally
falsifies the many justified beliefs we have concerning things that are
perceived as exemplifying just such properties. Insofar, that is, as we
are prima facie justified in thinking of something perceived *as
being a cow* really to be cow, and insofar as no overriding
cognition is forthcoming, we are entitled to think the perceived fact
of its being a cow is real. (See, on these lines of thought,
Taber's 2005 translation of the
*Slokavarttika*'s chapter on perception.)




With respect to the question of how timeless properties like *being
a cow* relate to the individuals that "manifest" them
(tokens are in this context referred to as *vyakti*,
"manifestations" of types), Kumarila aimed to finesse
the issue that bedeviled Brahmanical proponents of the Nyaya
school. Thus, Naiyayikas characteristically invoked the
Vaisesika category of "inherence"
(*samavaya*), holding that an "inherence"
relation obtained between universals and the particulars that
instantiate them. Criticizing the Nyaya account on the grounds
that thus positing an intermediary category to do the work of
*relating* the two different kinds of things just opens up an
infinite regress, Kumarila instead held a view with affinities to
the kind of perspectivalism that is generally characteristic of Jaina
philosophy; on this view, "universal" and
"particular" represent different aspects of the same
things, with neither aspect being finally intelligible apart from the
other. (See, e.g., *Slokavarttika*,
*akrtivada* 8, ff.; Jha, trans., 1983, 282,
ff.)


### 3.3 Presumption, "*apurva*," and the nature of the self




Among the grounds for certain of Kumarila's claims regarding
universals is the epistemic practice of *arthapatti*, or
"necessary presumption." This represents a doxastic
practice admitted as distinct (i.e., as a *pramana*)
only by Mimamsakas, with proponents of other schools of
thought having regarded this as indistinct from inference
(*anumana*). If there is a difference from inference as
that doxastic practice was systematized by Indian philosophers, it is
perhaps that *arthapatti* will not as readily admit of
formalization; this represents, then, something more like *inference
to the best explanation*--the presumption or
"positing" (*kalpana*) of something without
which some explanandum would not make sense. According to a stock
example, it must be supposed, of a corpulent person who never eats
during the daytime, that he eats at night. Kumarila appealed to
this mode of reasoning to argue, for example, for the necessity of
positing universals as the referents of words; thus, what one
understands, on rightly taking the meaning of a word, is *that*
(a universal) *without which* the word's communicative
capacity would not be intelligible.




The same epistemic procedure is invoked, as well, to offer a peculiar
alternative to the characteristically Buddhist view that awareness is
inherently reflexive (that all awareness, that is, involves
*svasamvitti*, or "self-awareness").
Profoundly wary of the significance of self-awareness in Buddhist
arguments for idealism--Dharmakirti's arguments for
the foundational character of self-awareness, for example, amount to a
case at least for the kind of *epistemic* idealism on which the
direct objects of awareness are mental representations (see Arnold
2008)--Kumarila was at pains to disallow that awareness is
essentially reflexive. Against that idea, he held the counter-intuitive view that
our awareness of ourselves *as being aware* is in fact a
presumption from *jnatata*, the fact of
something's "being known." From the occurrence of an
act of "being known," that is, we presume there to have
been an act of *knowing*, though that is not itself part of the
content of our awareness. Lest this seem a manifestly untenable idea,
it is worth noting that the broadly Sanskritic discussion of these
issues typically took its bearings from grammarians' analyses of
the various factors relatable to a verb in any sentence; thus,
Kumarila, like other Indian philosophers who argued against the
Buddhist doctrine of self-awareness, urged that it is incoherent to
hold that the same thing could at once be *agent* and
*patient* of a single act--and if it is counter-intuitive
to think, with Kumarila, of something's "being
known" prior to or independently of *a subject's
knowing* *that*, it may make a difference that the guiding
idea of "being known" is that of *an act such as can be
referred to*. "Being known," then, is here thought to
characterize the *objects* of such acts, and is therefore not
something itself to be known by introspection. (For a sympathetic reconstruction of this doctrine in a different context, see Siderits 2011.)




Most controversially, Kumarila invoked the epistemic practice of
"necessary presumption" in arguing (at great length in the
*Tantravarttika*) for the category of *apurva*,
which it is hard not to consider a basically *ad hoc* category
meant to account for the efficacy of Vedic sacrificial rites.
*Apurva* denotes, then, the temporally remote consequences
of ritual acts--what it is, in other words, in virtue of which a
correctly performed Vedic rite can be judged efficacious, even in the
absence of any immediately observed effect of the expected kind. The
felt need to posit such an entity follows from Kumarila's
convictions regarding the epistemic claim that is made (at least upon
the right kind of person) by Vedic injunctions. Thus, insofar as one
can (as Kumarila argued in elaborating the epistemology sketched
in SS2, above) justifiably hold that Vedic injunctions make
contentful claims about matters of ultimate importance, and insofar as
the rites enjoined thereby are manifestly temporal events that are yet
said to bear on always "yet-to-be-realized" states of
affairs, it must be the case that something relates present, temporally
occurrent ritual performances to the essentially imperceptible realm of
*dharma*; for otherwise, the Vedic injunctions would be
meaningless.




Here again, Kumarila's arguments relate closely to
linguistic preoccupations in light of which the point he makes can seem
more interesting than it might at first. With respect, then, to the
question of what, in the Vedic texts, *refers to* the obscure
"*apurva*" he has thus posited, Kumarila
holds that this should finally be understood as the referent of
*verbs*; for nouns essentially denote already present things,
whereas it is verbs in virtue of which injunctive sentences enjoin
actions that are always *to be completed*. (See, e.g.,
*Tantravarttika* 2.2.1, ff.; and
*Slokavarttika*,
*vakyadhikarana*, 330, ff.)
Kumarila's arguments here track, then, an often-cited
hermeneutical maxim favored by Mimamsakas: 
"what exists conduces to what is to be brought into being"
(*bhutam bhavyaya kalpate*). It is, in other
words, the state of affairs whose "realization"
(*bhavana*) is expressed by the verb that should be
judged predominant particularly in the injunctive sentences that
represent, for Mimamakas, the most important parts of
the Vedas. (See McCrea 2000.) So, just insofar as they refer to
already-present things, nouns refer to things that are essentially
*subordinated* to the realization (the
*bhavana*, or "making real") of the
*acts* that are what such sentences primarily enjoin; insofar,
then, as it is reasonable to think that verbs, too, must have
referents, and insofar as these referents are always essentially
*yet to be realized*, Kumarila thinks it necessary to posit
*apurva* (the temporally remote consequence of ritual acts)
as being, as it were, the "referents" of verbs. (See
Clooney 1990, 239, ff.; Halbfass 1991, 300-307)




Once again, Kumarila can here be seen to take his bearings
from the thought that what matters most is what is disclosed by the
unique capacity of language somehow to bring into view--indeed,
to bring into *being*--a world beyond what is actually
present. Kumarila's richly elaborated sense of our linguistic
being thus reflects, above all, a guiding commitment to the view that
Vedic injunctions essentially enjoin the ongoing *bringing into
being* of a ritual world that must continually be
renewed--that, indeed, the world itself is sustained by Vedic
sacrifice, which is rationally undertaken chiefly insofar as the texts
that enjoin this essentially transcend any particular human
perspective.




Kumarila's confidence in the genuinely referential nature of
language is also reflected, finally, in his characteristic arguments
for the idea that it is an enduring *atman*
("self") that is the underlying subject of all of our
actions (and that therefore stands to realize, in the future, the
fruits of Vedic practices). Like thinkers in the Brahmanical Nyaya
tradition of philosophy, Kumarila (here closely following
Sabara) was concerned to vindicate this conviction particularly in
the face of Buddhist arguments to the contrary (the claim that persons
are "without self," or *anatma*, being a
cardinal Buddhist doctrine). Kumarila's intuitions in this
regard center on the thought that "the notion
'I'" (*aham-pratyaya*) must have a real
referent. That this is so, he argues, is directly experienced in the
case of memory, the content of which constitutively involves reference
to "I" as the subject of past experiences now remembered.
In contrast, then, to arguments (such as those offered by many
proponents of Nyaya) to the effect that memory
*presupposes* an enduring subject, Kumarila's
distinctive claim is that in the always first-personally indexed
*content* of mnemonic experience we really
"encounter" the referent of the first-person pronoun.
Insofar, that is, as it doesn't make sense to think one might
remember an experience, and at the same time be uncertain about
*whose* experience it is that's remembered, it must be
thought that there is in this case genuine "recognition"
(*pratyabhijna*) of the referent of "the
notion 'I'." (See, especially,
*Slokavarttika*, *atmavada*, verses
107-110; Jha 1983, trans., 401-02; Taber 1990.)




Interestingly, Buddhists like Dignaga and Dharmakirti take
the phenomenologically second-order character of memory here identified
by Kumarila--the fact, that is, that mnemonic awareness is phenomenologically
distinct from present awareness in virtue of the explicitly reflexive character of memory--as evidence only that *moments of awareness* have a reflexive aspect. That momentary mental states are thus characterized by their "self-awareness" is, for these Buddhists, nothing like awareness *of a self*; rather, it is something like *the fact that moments of cognition are self-intimating*. (On *svasamvitti*, see Ganeri 1999, Kellner 2010, Thompson 2011.)




Kumarila, we noted at the beginning of this section, is deeply
resistant to the Buddhist doctrine of self-awareness, insofar as that
is enlisted by these Buddhists as evidence for the idealist claim that
we are, finally, indubitably aware only of the content of our own
mental states. Against, though, the Buddhist appeal to the
phenomenologically distinctive character of memory, Kumarila can
argue that it is not *moments of subjectivity* that we encounter in memory, but rather the fact that the subject who now remembers is *the same
as* the subject disclosed in the remembered experience. Not momentariness but *continuity* is the most phenomenologically salient feature of memory--and insofar as Kumarila here again takes his bearings from the guiding epistemological intuition that we are generally justified in taking awareness
as veridically disclosing just what it *seems* to us to disclose. While Buddhists like Dignaga and Dharmakirti propose, then,
an explanation of personhood that is counter-intuitive in light of the
*phenomenally* continuous character of awareness, Kumarila
can again invoke his characteristic epistemological doctrine; thus, he
argues not only that we are prima facie justified in believing
ourselves *really* to be as we seem (particularly in the case of
memory) to ourselves to be, but also that there is finally nothing that
can be taken to override that conviction. (See *atmavada*
verses 125-26 [Jha 1983, 405], and, as well, Taber 1990.)
Kumarila's account of the self, then, represents another expression of the common-sense realism that informs his entire project.


## 4. Ideology and ethics




That Kumarila can so often enlist common-sense intuitions in
defense of his project, however, might be thought in tension with such
surely non-commonsensical ideas as that there is a mysterious
"*apurva*" connecting the eminently temporal
acts of Vedic practitioners to the always "yet-to-be"
*dharma* from which Mimamsakas take their
bearings--and in tension, as well, with
Mimamsa's foundational appeal to an
essentially authorless corpus of Sanskrit texts. Indeed,
Kumarila's philosophically sophisticated efforts thus to
detach characteristically Vedic claims from any finite human
perspective can be understood as rather insidious. It is not beside the
point to note in this regard that the Mimamsa
tradition he advanced can be characterized (as by Sheldon Pollock) as
"the dominant orthodox discourse of traditional India"
(1989, 604); for it is at least arguably the case that it is
precisely the appeal to the transcendent character of the Vedas that
secured Mimamsa's dominance, and that
*the securing of dominance* was just the point of that
appeal. That is surely as some of Mimamsa's critics argued; proponents of the skeptical
"Carvaka" school of thought, for example, argued that the various
aspects of the Vedic worldview were all introduced by Brahmins simply in
order to secure their own livelihood as the adjudicators of that
tradition. Whether or not that represents a reasonable account of the
aims of Kumarila and other Mimamsakas, it is
surely a defensible view at least that such ideological effects were
among the upshots of Mimamsaka influence. Sheldon
Pollock has recurrently argued, in this vein, that the dominance
achieved by proponents of the Mimamsaka project is
reflected in widespread Indic conceptions of authoritative discourse in
general--conceptions such as Kumarila himself advanced with
his arguments concerning, e.g., the epistemic status of the vast corpus
of Brahmanical literature (generally styled *smrti*,
"tradition") that extends beyond the Vedic corpus
(contrastively styled *sruti*,
"revelation").




Thus, Kumarila argued at length in the
*Tantravarttika* (e.g., 1.3.1, ff.) that traditional
literature can be accepted as authoritative just insofar as it
exhibits the property of "being rooted in the Vedas"
(*vedamulatvam*)--even if that means, in some cases,
inferring the reality of a no-longer-accessible Vedic text as the
basis for retaining manifestly important traditions that do not
obviously stem from any extant Vedic text. Chief among the upshots of
this is that what Kumarila and other Mimamsakas
took to be the basis for the distinctive epistemic status of the
Vedas--namely, their being transcendently
"impersonal" (*apauruseya*)--was
effectively claimed, as well, for whole traditions of learning
ostensibly relatable to the Vedas. As Pollock has suggested,
"other sorts of Brahmanical intellectual practices seeking to
legitimate their truth-claims had perforce to conform to this special
model of what counts as knowledge, and so to suppress the evidence of
their own historical existence." (1989, 609; see, as well,
Halbfass 1991, *passim*)




The characteristically Mimamsaka claim that the Vedas
are eternal can thus be understood to inform a pan-Sanskritic episteme
such as lends itself to the sort of analysis that is characteristic of
Pierre Bourdieu, according to whom "every established order tends
to produce (to very different degrees and with very different means)
the naturalization of its own arbitrariness." (Bourdieu 1977,
164) The enormous influence of philosophical projects such as
Kumarila's, that is, arguably had the effect of masking the
specifically located and interested character particularly of
Brahmanical claims to authority, giving historical and contingent
claims the status that goes with their supposedly just reflecting
*the way things are*. It is not unreasonable, then, to see in
the success of Kumarila's project a paradigm case of the
kind of historical situation in which, as Bourdieu puts it, "the
established cosmological and political order is perceived not as
arbitrary, i.e. as one possible order among others, but as a
self-evident and natural order which goes without saying and therefore
goes unquestioned." (*ibid.*, 165-6) To that extent,
Kumarila's philosophy would seem readily to admit of the
kind of ideology critique advanced, following Bourdieu, by Pollock.




While that is not an unreasonable characterization of the context and
implications of his philosophy, Kumarila can also be read as
arguing for a radical de-centering of individual aims and
projects--for the relativization of all claims and goals to an
essentially linguistic reality that is above all distinguished by its
vastly exceeding any particular
perspective. Mimamsakas typically distinguished, in
this regard, between dimensions of Vedic practice that are essentially
"for the sake of the person"
(*purusartha*), and those that are "for the
sake of the sacrifice" (*kratvartha*)--and in the
final analysis, it is the latter dimensions that are of ultimate
significance for proponents of the Vedic worldview defended by
Kumarila. (This interpretation is advanced by Clooney 1990,
163, ff.) While Kumarila's robust realism surely extended,
then, to the thought that the *selves* persons typically take
themselves to be are real--that, e.g., the referential character
of the first-person pronoun discloses something that is really the
case--there is an important sense in which his project can be
taken finally to cut against the pursuit of any self-centered
agenda. Emphasizing, to similar effect, some profound intuitions that
can be understood as reflected in the doctrine of the transcendence of
the Vedas, J. N. Mohanty has suggested that the salient point of this
claim is that "the intention of the author is not relevant for
understanding the texts. The text itself is primary and
autonomous." (2007, 65)




Exemplifying, that is, a long-standing tradition that has always
already preceded the individuals who find themselves constituted
thereby, the Vedas, on the understanding of them commended by Mohanty,
"constitute the founding texts for the Hindu world by opening up
the horizon ... within which the tradition has understood itself
and [within which] we who belong to that tradition have understood
ourselves." (*ibid*.) Mohanty, then, not implausibly finds
it possible to see a basically Gadamerian thought reflected in the idea
of the Vedas as authorless, and thus to emphasize the character of
these as representing a *horizon* for (rather than a constraint
on) ethical thinking:  "The Hindu understanding of
*dharma* as embodied in the imperatives laid down in the [Vedas]
preserves the idea of ethics as rooted solidly in that tradition which
was founded by those texts, but which those texts have permitted us to
reinterpret ever anew." (*ibid*.) While this is an
interestingly profound characterization of some of the insights driving
Kumarila's project, it is no less reasonable to emphasize,
as well, that insofar as Kumarila's arguments helped secure
for Mimamsakas the status of privileged arbiters of
this ongoing "reinterpretation," questions of power and
authority remain ineliminable from an understanding of what he was up
to.