  That is what it might look like to suppose, against the Mīmāṃsakas, that the status of first-order cognitions as epistemically reliable should be thought to require demonstration with reference to something over and above the initial cognitions. Against this, Kumārila argues that the problem with such an appeal is that the second-order awareness that the thing perceived is pragmatically efficacious is itself just another cognition. Kumārila would allow, then, that a subsequent cognition concerning pragmatic efficacy could count as a potential source of falsification; the impossibility of carrying water with what had seemed to be a jar would indeed count as overriding the previously justified belief that one had seen a jar. What he refuses, however, is the claim that the cognition of pragmatic efficacy provides a fundamentally different kind of justification than the initial cognition. Confidence, to the contrary, that pragmatic efficacy does provide something more—that it tells us, e.g., that an initially justified belief is also true—could only be based on the presupposition that “pragmatic efficacy” is somehow more immediately available to awareness than, say, a jar; but this begs precisely the question at issue, and Kumārila can not unreasonably ask why the Buddhist is willing to credit the second-order cognition as intrinsically valid, but not the first.