UGC NET Questions (Paper – 1)

Arthāpatti is invoked when accepted facts seem mutually inconsistent unless a new connecting fact is assumed. For example, if a person is known to be alive and also known never to eat during the day, one postulates that they must eat at night. This postulated eating is neither directly perceived nor inferred in the usual way, yet it is taken as a necessary explanation. Schools that accept arthāpatti treat such postulation as an independent pramāṇa.

Option A:
Option A would collapse arthāpatti into perception, but perception requires direct sense contact and does not involve positing unseen facts to preserve coherence.

Option B:
Option B describes upamāna, where knowledge arises from similarity, not from reconciling conflicting data by assumption.

Option C:
Option C correctly states that arthāpatti works by positing an unobserved fact which, if accepted, makes the known facts consistent.

Option D:
Option D again reduces the process to memory, which merely reproduces earlier cognitions and cannot by itself resolve new apparent contradictions.

Arthāpatti is invoked when two accepted facts seem inconsistent unless a new, unobserved fact is assumed. For example, if a person is known to be alive and yet never seen eating in the day, one postulates that they eat at night. This postulated connecting fact is not straightforwardly perceived or inferred in the usual way but is taken as a distinct mode of valid cognition. Thus, arthāpatti is treated as an independent pramāṇa by schools that accept it.

Option A:
Option A would make arthāpatti indistinguishable from perception, which contradicts the emphasis on postulating something not directly seen.

Option B:
Option B resembles upamāna, where similarity between things gives new knowledge, but arthāpatti resolves clashes between known facts rather than relying on likeness.

Option C:
Option C correctly characterises arthāpatti as a special kind of reasoning where an unobserved fact is posited to maintain coherence among accepted data.

Option D:
Option D associates the pramāṇa with purely negative instances, which is more relevant to certain inferences or to absence cognition than to arthāpatti specifically.