  A common failure of translators rendering the technical terms of the Indian epistemological schools into the technical terms, or even not so technical, of English and analytic philosophy, is ignorance of the latter. For example, several words, the most common of which is ‘jñāna’, are standardly rendered with the word ‘knowledge’ in English (e.g., Bhatt 1989). However, proper Sanskrit usage allows “false” jñāna, whereas there is no false knowledge as the words are used in (analytic) English. There is a deeper lesson here than that translators should study Western philosophy, the lesson, namely, that although there may be false jñāna—let us say “cognition”: there are true and false cognition—it is commonly assumed in everyday speech as well as by the Indian epistemologists (with a few exceptions, notably, the second-century Buddhist Nāgārjuna and certain followers including Śrīharṣa, the eleventh-century Advaitin) that cognition is ordinarily by nature true or veridical. It is error and falsity that are the deviations from the normal and natural. That is to say, cognition is regarded as knowledge as a kind of conversational default—and so to translate ‘jñāna’ as “knowledge” turns out not to be so bad after all. When the eighth-century Advaitin Śaṅkara says that from the perspective of spiritual knowledge (vidyā) the knowledge we recognize in everyday speech turns out to be illusory, mithyā-jñāna, “false knowledge,” this is supposed to be felt as almost a contradiction in terms (Brahma-sūtra Commentary, preamble).