 Two Mīmāṃsā views compete to explain sentential unity, along with a third, a sentence holism belonging to the grammarian Bhartṛhari (third century), who holds that words have no meaning outside the context of the sentence, which is the basic semantic unit. Words are abstractions from sentences, and a sentence is understood holistically “in a flash” (sphoṭa; Bhartṛhari’s theory is called sphoṭa-vāda). This is an easy target for the Mīmāṃsākas, who point to our abilities to use the same words in different sentences. But the one camp, the Prābhākara, agrees with the grammarian that words do not convey meaning apart from the full sentence being understood, that is to say, apart from the full fact indicated being known “in a flash,” as it were. The other camp, the Bhāṭṭa, whose theory comes to be taken over by Nyāya, claims that individual words have reference in isolation, and that in understanding a sentence we understand the meaning of the individual semantic units which get combined not so much by the sentence as by the fact that makes a true sentence true, the relation holding the fact together becoming reflected in the unity of the sentence, so that each word’s meaning or referent is hooked up with every other. These two views are termed in Sanskrit anvita-abhidhāna-vāda, “reference of the connected,” which Siderits (1991) translates as the “related designation view,” and abhihita-anvaya-vāda, “connection of the referents,” which Siderits translates as the “words-plus-relation view.” However, the latter might not be the best rendering, since its advocates argue that the relation is nothing other than the individual denotees as related.