  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 svasaṃvitti, or “self-awareness”). Profoundly wary of the significance of self-awareness in Buddhist arguments for idealism—Dharmakīrti’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)—Kumārila 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 jñātatā, 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, Kumārila, 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 Kumārila, 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.)