  Uṃveka worries, then, that if Kumārila is understood as saying that a cognition’s being truth-conducive follows simply from its being a cognition, there would be the unwanted consequence that if one mistook the glint of mother-of-pearl for that of a piece of silver (a stock example of error in Indian philosophy), this erroneous cognition would have to be credited as a “veridical cognition” (pramāṇa). (It matters for this discussion that the word pramāṇa is equivocal, alternately referring to reliable doxastic practices, and to episodes of veridical cognition such as result from the exercise thereof.) Uṃveka’s intuition, then, is that “being a pramāṇa” can only characterize, as it were, the certified outcome of the epistemic process; he is therefore concerned to interpret Kumārila’s doctrine in such a way that “being intrinsically truth-conducive” ends up being predicated only of what are clearly veridical cognitions.