Unfolding parallel reasoning in islamic jurisprudence. Epistemic and Dialectical Meaning within Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī’s System of Co-Relational Inferences of the Occasioning Factor.
Résumé
One of the epistemological results emerging from this initial study is that the
different forms of co-relational inference, known in the Islamic jurisprudence as qiyās,
represent an innovative and sophisticated form of reasoning that not only provides new
epistemological insights into legal reasoning in general but also furnishes a fine-grained
pattern for parallel reasoning which can be deployed in a wide range of problemsolving
contexts and does not seem to reduce to the standard forms of analogical
argumentation studied in contemporary philosophy of science. However, in the present
paper we will only discuss the case of so-called co-relational inferences of the
occasioning factor and only in the context of Islamic jurisprudence.