  An account of the possible overriding of prima facie justified beliefs turns out, then, to be integral to Kumārila’s epistemology. One might, in this regard, worry that on the view he thus proposes, second-order cognitions of defeaters end up themselves having a privileged status; that is, Kumārila might be thought to credit “overriding cognitions” (bādhakajñāna) with a capacity for effecting epistemic closure such as he does not allow for the initial cognitions thus overridden (which, as with scientific hypotheses for Popper, are taken as never able to provide any definitive epistemic closure). Thus, for example, it could be supposed that one might just as well conclude, from the fact that two contradictory cognitions have arisen, that the second one is suspect—and that it would therefore be unwarrantedly privileging “overriding” cognitions to suppose that second-order cognitions ipso facto count as evidence of the falsity of the prior cognitions on which they bear.  Here, though, it matters that Kumārila’s account involves essentially phenomenological considerations; his point is just that a subsequent cognition calls for the revision of a preceding one only if it seems to a subject to do so. Thus, to have some prima facie justified belief subsequently called into question just is for the subsequent cognition to present itself as having, phenomenologically, the force of overriding the preceding; if that is not how the second awareness seems, then its phenomenological content will not be that of an overriding cognition in the first place, and it therefore will not present itself to the subject thereof as undermining any already-held belief.