Carvaka Indian materialism. Its varieties share the view that the mind is simply the body and its capacities, but differ as to whether every mental property is simply a physical property under some psychological description (reductive materialism) or there are emergent irreducibly mental properties that are caused by physical properties and themselves have no causal impact (epiphenomenalism). Some Carvaka epistemologists, at least according to their critics, accept only perception as a reliable source of knowledge, but in its most sophisticated form Carvaka, not unlike logical positivism, allows inference at least to conclusions that concern perceptually accessible states of affairs. See also HINDUIS. K.E.Y.