Abstract

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 problem-solving 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.