 The Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti (a follower of Dignāga) takes up these concerns on behalf of the Buddhist in his Pramāṇavārttikasvavṛtti (PV(SV) heceforth). Dharmakīrti responds to this concern but rather than addressing all the categories separately; he offers a general argument. He claims that all meaningful discourse serves to rule things out: “an utterance is inseparably related to delimitation” (PV(SV) 122–123). The point is illustrated by using examples of commands (PVSV61, 20–26). If one desires only water and does not care how it is brought one says “Bring water”, but if one desires a pot of water, one would have to say, ‘Bring water in a pot’. Similarly, one mentions ‘water’ to rule out other substances, ‘bringing’ to rule out other actions. Taber and Kataoka (forthcoming) summarise it thus: “a word is only uttered when certain things are to be excluded by uttering it, not otherwise, and presumably this would be true of all parts of speech”. Dharmakīrti adds two other conditions. First, words are uttered only when there is some doubt. Second, words are almost always uttered in a sentence and their excluding function is specified by the context and relation to other words in the context. Dharmakīrti’s also responds to the first concern raised above: aren’t all words synonymous on the Buddhist view? No, says Dharmakīrti, because apohas are not real properties, rather they are “differences”. Apohas are contrasts that distinct individuals share by differing from the same (more exactly, qualitatively similar) other things. They are not properties that things in themselves have by virtue of belonging to a class (say of cows). Rather, they are absences things have in virtue of not having certain properties. So, for example, a certain individual –say a spotted cow—has one absence (that of being a not non-cow) insofar as it is viewed, together with certain other individuals as different from non-cows, and has another absence (that of being not non-spotted) insofar as it is viewed together with certain other not non-spotted individuals which may include cows, horses, humans. Different words that are applied to the same object – cow and spotted – have different meanings depending on the corresponding differences or exclusions from other things. Explaining these stanzas in his PV(SV) Dharmakīrti says,