It tries to create realities in a logical way, which cannot be refuted. It states that our senses provide us with direct awareness of the objects. This is related to the Western philosophical concept of direct, naïve or perceptual realism. Reasoning about objects leads to knowledge of them. It states that jīva, the individual being, goes through endless cycles of birth and death.

A logician of nyāya seeks to acquire knowledge of all phenomena. Freedom is achieved by a detached soul who supposedly has knowledge of things through reasoning. From a Vedāntic perspective, this is an act of arrogance, because the individual with little knowledge sets himself up as īśvara who is all knowledge of all relative phenomena.

Vedānta is happy to enter into a debate with Nyāya. This means that it tries to take the interlocutor to the fact that there must be something that must make all logic and conclusions possible, and that that is the truth. The point that vedānta makes is that every conclusion shows an entity that is aware of it. This indescribable and objectifiable entity is the truth of everything. That's you.

Nyāya argues that truth is defined in terms of agreement with facts from empirical reality and that the testing of truth is pragmatic. The knowledge should stimulate fruitful activity.

Nyāya sees the self (ātman) as an individual soul, which is separate from mind, body and world. Souls, atoms, space, time, bodies, and the world are independent, eternal substances. Knowledge of all these realities, to be attained by logical reasoning, is a state of bliss according to Nyāya, and with it freedom (mokṣa).