In reply to the obvious objection, that in many other sentences, such as “The cow is in the garden”, a particular cow is referred to, these Mīmāṃsakas appeal to the idea that a sentence can carry an ‘implication’ (ākṣepa) other than its literal meaning. Thus the sentence “The cow is in the garden” may mean literally that cowhood is collocated with occurrence-in-the-garden (i.e. that there exists a cow in the garden), but carries the implication that a certain particular cow is in the garden. The