  The Naiyāyikas thus say that every negative sentence is the negation of a sentence of the form “aRb”, and they distinguish between cases where the relation R is the identity relation and cases where it is a relation other than identity. The object a is called the locus of the absence, and the object b is called the ‘counterpositive’ or ‘negatum’ (pratiyogin) of the absence, i.e. it is the object whose presence in the locus is being denied. This highlights the fact that absences are thought of as a kind of property or ‘locatable’, rather than as a kind of ‘location’ (at least when the relation is not identity). For example, the absence of A is located in many places at once. It is not said that there is a distinct absence-of-A at each and every place where A is absent. We can now see how the Nyāya parse negative sentences without using a sentential negation. Take the sentence “The pot is not blue”. The first-order paraphrase of this would be: It is not the case that the pot is blue (¬Fa). The Nyāya strategy is first to say that every property, such as blueness, has both an extension F (places where it is located) and a counter-extension F′ (places where its absence is located), and then to paraphrase the sentence as: The pot has absence-of-blue. Note that a partially locatable property is one for which the extension and counter-extension overlap—it is possible for a feature to be collocated with its absence.