  Among Kumārila’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 Kumārila’s argument can be brought out by briefly contrasting this epistemological position with what Mīmāṃsakas not unreasonably took to be the characteristically Buddhist position in this regard (with its being particularly the thought of Buddhists like Dignāga and Dharmakīrti that Mīmāṃsakas targeted with their epistemological arguments). Against the kind of common-sense realism exemplified by proponents of Mīmāṃsā, 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 Dignāga and Dharmakīrti privileged what they took to be the constitutively nonconceptual, perceptual awareness that ultimately discloses, they take it, only fleeting particulars. Dharmakīrti’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 Mīmāṃsakas, since the kinds of abstract objects posited to make sense of language cannot be thought to have causal efficacy.)