He treats these terms as equivalent: perception, consciousness, testimony, inner sensation.
The faculties of perception, memory, testimony, introspection, reasoning, and so on, typically generate beliefs on the basis of sufficient evidence, and we usually regard these faculties as malfunctioning, maladjusted, or misused when they generate beliefs in other ways.
A stock example: from the premise, "Fat Devadatta does not eat during the day" (known by perception and/or testimony), the conclusion is known (by arthāpatti), "He eats at night".
Indian philosophers, particularly under the influence of the Nyāya tradition of thought (and of the appropriation and systematization of its main terms of art by the Buddhists Dignāga and Dharmakīrti), were generally preoccupied by Kumārila's time with the issue of pramāṇas with the question of which doxastic practices (perception, inference, testimony, etc).
The process of generating testimonial knowledge begins with a speaker S who knows a proposition p by perception, inference, or testimony (chains of testimony are okay) and who has a desire to communicate p to someone or other.
Like Kumarila, they accepted six ways of knowing: perception, inference, verbal testimony, comparison, nonperception, and postulation.
As ways of valid knowing, the Bhattas recognized perception, inference, verbal testimony (shabda), comparison (upamana), postulation (arthapatti), and nonperception (anupalabdhi).
That, said Mr. Imwinkelried, a law professor at the University of California at Davis, "could conceivably be an important weapon in the hands of defense counsel, because you've got a widespread public perception that fingerprint testimony is infallible".
The principal candidates are perception, inference, and testimony.
The pre-Dignāga Nyāyā school proposed four types of pramāṇa: perception, inference, verbal testimony, and analogy.
