The Mimarhsa, like most other schools, admits two kinds of knowledge, immediate and mediate. Valid knowledge is one which yields some new information about something, is not contradicted by any other knowledge and is not generated by defective conditions (such as defective sense-organ in the cases of perceptual knowledge, fallacious premises in the cases of inference, etc.)
The object of immediate knowledge must be something existing (sat). Only when such an object is related to sense (one of the five external senses and the internal sense, manas), there arises in the soul an immediate knowledge about it.
When an object is related to sense, at first there arises a bare awareness of the object. We simply know that the object is, but have not yet understood utilities.
This primary, indeterminate, immediate knowledge is called nirvikalpaka pratyaksa or alocana-jnana.
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When at the next stage we interpret the meaning of this object in the light of our past knowledge and come to understand what it is, that is, what class it belongs to, what quality, activity and name it possesses, we have a determinate (savikalpaka) perception, which is expressed by judgments like ‘This is a man,’ ‘This has a stick,’ ‘This is white,’ ‘This is moving.’ ‘This is Ram.’
Perception, thus completed in two stages, gives us a real knowledge of the world composed of different objects.
Though at the first stage the objects are not known explicitly, all that we know about them at the second stage is ynplicitly known even at first.
In understanding the object at the second stage, the mind only interprets, in the light of past experience, what is given at first; it does not ascribe to it any imaginary predicate.
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For if we did not perceive at first a man, a white one, etc., how could we judge later that it was a man, it was white, etc., and that it was not a cow and not black, etc.
Hence it must be admitted that perception in spite of containing an element of interpretation, is not necessarily imaginary and illusory as some Baudhas and some Vedantins hold.
Neither is it true that what we are immediately aware of, before the mind interprets, is a purely unique particular (svalaksana) without any distinguishing class character (as those Baudhas hold), or is pure existence without any differentiating property (as those Vedantins say).
The diverse objects of the world with their different characteristics are given to the mind at the very first moment when we become aware of them.