Inferences by Parallel Reasoning in Islamic Jurisprudence

This monograph proposes a new (dialogical) way of studying the different forms of correlational inference, known in the Islamic jurisprudence as qiys. According to the authors view, qiys represents an innovative and sophisticated form of dialectical reasoning that not only provides new epistemological insights into legal argumentation in general (including legal reasoning in Common and Civil Law) 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 reasoning studied in contemporary philosophy of science and argumentation theory. After an overview of the emergence of qiys and of the work of al-Shrz penned by Soufi Youcef, the authors discuss al-Shrzs classification of correlational inferences of the occasioning factor (qiys al-'illa). The second part of the volume deliberates on the system of correlational inferences by indication and resemblance (qiys al-dalla, qiys al-shabah). The third part develops the main theoretical background of the authors work, namely, the dialogical approach to Martin-Lf's Constructive Type Theory. The authors present this in a general form and independently of adaptations deployed in parts I and II. Part III also includes an appendix on the relevant notions of Constructive Type Theory, which has been extracted from an overview written by Ansten Klev. The book concludes with some brief remarks on contemporary approaches to analogy in Common and Civil Law and also to parallel reasoning in general.