  In reply to the obvious objection, that in many other sentences, such as “The cow is in the garden”, a particular cow is referred to, these Mīmāṃsakas appeal to the idea that a sentence can carry an ‘implication’ (ākṣepa) other than its literal meaning. Thus the sentence “The cow is in the garden” may mean literally that cowhood is collocated with occurrence-in-the-garden (i.e. that there exists a cow in the garden), but carries the implication that a certain particular cow is in the garden. The principle here is that a prior awareness of the qualifier (viśeṣaṇa) leads to an implicated awareness of the thing qualified (viśeṣya) (TSD 66b). The Nyāya reply to this argument proceeds by way of rejecting the principle cited, for, they say, awareness of a qualifier or universal is possible only via an awareness of the thing qualified. 