  For Dignāga and Dharmakīrti the apprehension of a  resemblance (sādṛśya) between different  objects, which marks the transition from an indistinct perceptual  experience to a distinct cognitive awareness, is in itself a form of  conceptual elaboration. In keeping with the Abhidharma traditions,  the epistemologists admit that perception is mediated by our internal propensities as well as by the range of our perceptual systems. However, they do not accept the reality of resemblance relations, even though  they admit that cognitive aspects (specifically those by which an object is  apprehended) are pragmatically effective. A difficulty arises when  attempting to explain extension in the case of empirical objects,  which are apprehended by means of a cognitive aspect. This difficulty is overcome by adopting the Yogācāra perspective on the  self-revealing (svaprakāśa) nature of cognitive  awareness. On this perspective, each instance of cognitive awareness  has a dual aspect: that of a subjective appearance  (svābhāsa) and that of an objective appearance  (viṣayābhāsa) (see Collection on Valid  Cognition, PS I, k9a; Hattori 1968, 28). The subjective aspect  (grāhakākāra) denotes the sense of  intimation that accompanies each cognitive event, while the objective aspect (grāhyākāra) captures the intentional  character of cognition or its object-directedness. This dual aspect  theory of cognitive awareness endorses the existence of a meta-cognitive level of analysis, which explains why cognition does  not happen “in the dark”; rather, it is always accompanied by  self-intimation, by an experience of “what it is like” to be apprehending a given object (cf. Ganeri 1999).