 Straddling the delicate line between a realist view that affirms the reality of universals and an antirealist one that denies the reality of concepts, a Geluk account of epistemology holds that universals are real, but that they do not exists separately from their particular instances. For instance, the universal “cow” and the particular instances of cow are held to be not utterly distinct, as antirealists would have it, nor are they held to be the same, as a strict realist would claim, but are rather said to be “extensionally identical but intensionally distinct” (Dreyfus 1997, 174–78). In the epistemological context, articulating this relationship is an attempt to account for the efficacy of concepts without giving universals an autonomous existence apart from their instances. Given that the Geluk tradition claims that Dharmakīrti’s epistemological project represents an inferior philosophical position, it is arguably studied for didactic purposes, whereas the nominalism of what Geluk thinkers consider their own tradition—the view of the Consequence School of the Middle Way—is the hallmark of their philosophy.