  Despite the importance of thus distinguishing these two moments in Kumārila’s case for Vedic authority—the epistemological moment, that is, and the case for the essentially transcendent character of the Vedas—it should be allowed that Mīmāṃsaka commitments regarding the eternality of language in general (and of the Vedas in particular) are hardly incidental to their overall position. While, however, few modern readers are likely to be favorably inclined towards the view that the Vedic texts are authorless, these commitments reflect often profound intuitions, elaborated by Kumārila and other Mīmāṃsakas, about the irreducibly linguistic character of thought, and about the reality of the kinds of universals that must be posited to make sense of the objectivity of language. Arguing, in this regard, for the eternality of language, Kumārila challenged (chiefly Buddhist and Nyāya) proponents of contract- or convention-theories of linguistic origins to explain how any particular linguistic act could coherently be imagined as the first such act. The problem he raises is that any particular linguistic act is intelligible as a linguistic act—intelligible, that is, as instituting linguistic policies—only given the prior understanding that the meaning-creating utterance itself means something. One person could, that is, propose to another that (for example) this thing here be called a ‘cow’ only by telling her so—but the possibility of his doing so is just what we are in this case trying to explain.