Abstract
In Islamic jurisprudence qiyās or correlational inference is a pattern of reasoning applied in order to establish the legal validity of a ruling when this ruling is neither literally nor evidently sanctioned by the scriptural sources. This pattern of reasoning is one of the forms ijitihād can take and it assumes that legal knowledge is achieved by rational endeavour, the intellectual effort of human beings. This elucidates the meaning of the word “fiqh”, Islamic law/jurisprudence, which literally means “deep understanding”.
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Notes
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Hallaq (1987).
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In fact, we have discussed this issue in the final remarks of our book (Rahman et al., 2019). In general, what we discuss here can be seen as further development of our remarks regarding the encounter between qiyās and the contemporary theories of parallel reasoning.
- 4.
See Bartha (2010, Chapter 1 & 4). In general, he introduces the rhetorical device as one method for testing the epistemic strength of a purported analogy. To that effect Bartha (2010, p. 5) writes:
I shall introduce a rhetorical device that will be useful throughout the book.
The philosophical argument is based on the assumption that justification for analogical reasoning, or at least the sort of justification that is of primary interest, should be public. It should be based on communicable experiences, models, and assumptions. This requirement certainly supports the thesis that justifiable analogical reasoning is capable of representation in argument form. It does not rule out the inclusion of visual information, such as diagrams, in the argument. The rhetorical device is to imagine that the analogical reasoning is presented by an enthusiastic advocate to a polite but moderately sceptical interlocutor, the critic. The reasoning succeeds if it survives the critic’s scrutiny. The framework of advocate and critic helps to set a standard of justification that can be varied to reflect the demands of different settings. It also provides a vivid way to appreciate the requirement of publicity.
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Bartha (2010) defines such conditions as prima facie plausibility for analogical arguments.
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In relation to this issue, Bartha (2010, p. 198) states:
I suggest that a correlative analogical argument is cogent if it provides reason to infer that the source and target domains are likely to belong to a common kind, corresponding to a common nature that is responsible for the cited and hypothetical similarities.
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Perhaps, that is why in his recent publication Brewer (2018) splits step 4 into two steps: step 4: AWR and step 5: AWRa. However, we will stick to the above schema since an AWRa, in our view, relates exclusively to an AWR. Moreover, the conclusion achieved within Brewer’s deductivist approach is in fact inferred from an AWR, not an AWRa.
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151 N.Y. 163 (N.Y. 1896).
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- 10.
Notice that a GS might be based on putting together similar rather than identical properties – see Woods (2015, p. 277).
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Let us remark that in our framework, instantiating a GS is the way to justify a GS. Indeed, justifications are, in our framework, instances or tokens of a type. Moreover, as discussed in Rahman et al. (2018, 2019), local reasons, or reasons brought forward during a play, should be distinguished from strategic reasons, or reasons that constitute (the justification of) a winning strategy either by establishing the validity or by establishing the truth of material inferences. Thus, despite Woods’ (2015, pp. 263–272) scepticism towards justification approaches, the instantiations at work in his own GS are, after all, either (local) reasons or else justifications, that is, strategic reasons encoding a recapitulation of the process leading to the resulting legal ruling.
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Clearly, we indulge here in the anachronism of deploying Brandom’s (1994) terminology in the context of a dialectical practice rather far in time and space from the one discussed by Brandom. Perhaps this also suggests that the emergence of the dialectic stance on the rational assessment of notions and beliefs implicit in social practices has quite a long and rich history behind it.
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Iqbal, M. (2022). Concluding Remarks: Qiyās and Contemporary Models of Parallel Reasoning. In: Arsyad al-Banjari’s Insights on Parallel Reasoning and Dialectic in Law. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91676-3_7
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