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ANALOGY
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its name told; but he treats as a class apart the cases when a thing is described to the novice in terms of its bare similarity to a familiar thing. Hence it is that the case of a perceptual cognition where there is put to use the knowledge of word-meaning acquired in the first two ways is treated by him as a case of perceptual cognition, while the case where there is put to use the knowledge of word-meaning acquired in the third way is treated by him not as a case of perceptual cognition but as a case of upamāna. As a matter of fact, the third class of cases is a minor sub-class of the second class which goes to cover the large majority of cases of a man learning word-meaning. For to say that x is similar to :y is useless unless the similarity concerned is precisely defined in terms of certain features. belonging to both x and y, but to thus describe x's similarity to y is to describe x in terms of certain features belonging to x, which will be our second way of describing x. In any case, it is difficult to attribute the same fundamental importance to what the Naiyāyika treats as cases of perception, inference and verbal testimony and what he treats as cases of upamāna. Jayanta himself roundly says that the cases of upamāna are treated by the aphorist separately because being a compassionate personage he wanted to impart whatever information was useful to man in however a fashion. It seems that the early Nyāya authors attached so much importance to the cases of upamāna because inference itself was understood by them as essentially a process of knowing something about x as a result of knowing something about things similar to x, an understanding which somehow lingered in the Nyāya school throughout its history and which explains the Naiyāyika's resistance to attaching due importance to causal experimentation as the prime method of establishing an invariable concomitance. The surmise is somewhat confirmed when we learn that the Mimāṁsakas too posited upamāna as an independent pramāņa by the side of perception, inference etc. How they viewed the matter should become clear from Jayanta's criticism of the Mimāsā concept of upamāna-pramāņa.
On the Mimāṁsaka's showing a case of upamāna arises when an expert tells a novice that such and such an unfamiliar thing is similar to such and such a familiar thing and the latter later on coming across this unfamiliar thing recalls that that familiar thing is similar to this unfamiliar thing now encountered; his understanding is that this is not a case of perception because the concerned familiar thing is not present
