 So how are these passages in Dharmakīrti and the commentarial literature to be taken? How do his two positions hang together? One interpretation might be to say that Dharmakīrti, somewhat naïvely, thought he could arrive at a thoroughly infallible inductive procedure by ever more adroit qualifications of the observations and non-observations. Gillon (1991) is an attempt to show that Dharmakīrti’s philosophy, in attempting to come up with such a watertight procedure, ran up against a problem of induction that wouldn’t go away. A more charitable exegesis is to say that his philosophy recognizes that the way we find out through a posteriori methods whether or not x and y are causally related is a quite different matter from what causality is—the latter, as we had remarked, involves causal properties of things that make them what they are. Thus we might have to discover empirically that fire will burn fuel under such and such conditions, but nonetheless that property is not one that it could do without and still be fire. The more sophisticated interpretation of Dharmakīrti would then be that causality between things is a more-than-contingent connection due to the constitutive properties of things in this world, but nonetheless one that is established a posteriori. To take a modern analogy in a Kripkean vein, while water must be H2O and whales must be mammals, we discover those facts, which in some sense could not be otherwise, through empirical methods and fallibly  .