Nyāya is the native tradition of logic and epistemology. Its foundational text is Gautama's Nyāyasūtra (c. 150 AD), which deals mainly with logic, epistemology, and the theory of debate. The Nyāya philosophy is primarily concerned with the conditions of valid thought and the means of acquiring true knowledge of objects (S.C. Chatterjee 1939).

With regard to language, Nyāya entertains the view that language is the bearer of reality and is invented to express reality or padārthas. Each and every word must have a referent and cannot be used to express something unreal or absurd (Ghosh 2022). Hence there is no strict distinction between the sense of a word and its referent. In addition, Nyāya espouses the position that the relation between words and objects is conventional; meanings were assigned to words at some point in the past. Finally, unlike Mīmāṃsā which maintains that the Veda does not have an author, Nyāya adopts the view that the Veda has a trustworthy author, and the reliability of the Veda depends on the trustworthiness of its author.