Qiyās al-ʿIlla: al-Shīrāzī’s System of Correlational Inferences of the Occasioning Factor

Abstract

One of the epistemological results emerging from the present study is that the different forms of correlational 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 problem-solving contexts and does not seem to reduce to the standard forms of analogical argumentation studied in contemporary philosophy of science.