  The idea is this. Anyone who understands an utterance of the sentence “(The) cow is in the garden” does so by (a) identifying a certain object as the referent of the word “cow”, and (b) grasps that that individual is qualified by the property occurrence-in-the-garden. However, one can only identify an object by distinguishing it from others, and this involves the use of a distinguishing feature. So the individual is grasped in awareness as distinguished/qualified by the feature cowhood. Since the meaning of a word is, by definition, its contribution to the final belief generated by hearing the utterance containing the word, the meaning of “cow” is an individual as qualified by cowhood. Note that, on such a theory, token utterances of “cow” vary with respect to the individual to which they refer, but every token utterance nevertheless shares a common semantic property, viz. “ …—qualified-by-cowhood”. The Naiyāyikas in this way draw a distinction between type- and token- meaning (or, as some say, between meaning and reference).