 It remains far from clear, however, how genuine nominalist mileage is to be gained on a top-down approach, ingenious as it may be. The usual charge against it by non-Buddhist critics, like Kumārila and Uddyotakara, is circularity: if an understanding of blue is to be analyzed as an understanding of non-non-blue and any negation presupposes understanding the negandum, then understanding what non-non-blue is would depend on understanding blue—we go round in circles. Hugon (2011) gives Dharmakīrti’s response to that charge, which consists essentially of a tu quoque argument—one needs to understand what a term excludes as much as what it applies to. Hale (2011) reformulates the difficulty as being that the Buddhist seems to run counter to the compositionality of language; he argues that the non-Buddhist criticism will thus remain. The problem is discussed intensely by Indo-Tibetan thinkers, like Śāntarakṣita (for further discussion, see the entry on  Śāntarakṣita)  and Sa skya Paṇḍita (see Hugon 2008, 479–485, 205–210). What is striking is that while it can certainly be argued—as these thinkers do—that a meaningful term presents both a class of things to which it applies and another to which it does not apply, it is difficult to see how the latter would or should occupy a privileged place. Why would we understand words first and foremost by the via negativa?