  Among the grounds for certain of Kumārila’s claims regarding universals is the epistemic practice of arthāpatti, or “necessary presumption.” This represents a doxastic practice admitted as distinct (i.e., as a pramāṇa) only by Mīmāṃsakas, with proponents of other schools of thought having regarded this as indistinct from inference (anumāna). If there is a difference from inference as that doxastic practice was systematized by Indian philosophers, it is perhaps that arthāpatti will not as readily admit of formalization; this represents, then, something more like inference to the best explanation—the presumption or “positing” (kalpanā) of something without which some explanandum would not make sense. According to a stock example, it must be supposed, of a corpulent person who never eats during the daytime, that he eats at night. Kumārila appealed to this mode of reasoning to argue, for example, for the necessity of positing universals as the referents of words; thus, what one understands, on rightly taking the meaning of a word, is that (a universal) without which the word’s communicative capacity would not be intelligible.