  Just as perception and inference are described, in the pramāṇa system, as knowledge-yielding faculties, so too is language. This leads the Nyāya to formulate a description of the mechanism by which a competent language-user is able to decode noise-utterances and derive language-based knowledge. The description The Manual of Reason gives of this ‘language processing mechanism’ is as follows (TS 67, 68). The input to the process is the hearer’s auditory perception of a spoken utterance qua uninterpreted noise, and this is identified as the ‘special’ instrument cause (karaṇa). For example, hearing the noise-string