Abstract

This chapter places the Shāfiʿī legal-theoretical conception of qiyās al-shabah, or inferring a ruling based on mere resemblance, in dialogue with Aristotle's analysis of the fallacy of the consequent, within its broader classification under the fallacy of accident. Aristotle's diagnosis concerns the reversal of predicative dependence: a predicate that follows from a subject under a particular determination is mistakenly treated as though it could determine the subject itself. The example of honey and bile shows how a shared predicate such as yellowness can become an illicit basis for substitution. Our focal account of qiyās al-shabah, drawn from the theory of al-Māwardī and al-Rūyānī, addresses a related problem of controlled transfer, but does not license a ruling in a branch-case merely on the basis of a common feature it shares with a root-case. Rival root-cases are assessed within a carrier context constituted by the legal object and the specific problem-case, and the operative determination is applied through such factors as elimination via inconsistency, or affirmation via predominance, proximity, or generic affinity. This study accordingly extends Gazziero and Rahman's notion of anchoring, developed in their reconstruction of Aristotle's fallacy of accident, into a framework of preferred anchorings: the task is not only to preserve the configuration licensing a predicate, but also to determine which admissible configuration should govern the transfer. Ultimately, qiyās al-shabah should therefore not be understood as an instance of the fallacy of the 1 This research was conceived for and completed within the framework of the ERC Synergy Grant 101167470 "RevLog-Redux -Logic in Reverse Redux. Illegitimate Argumentative Moves in the Arabic, Byzantine, Hebrew and Latin Medieval Traditions". As such, it was funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. consequent-for it ranks admissible resemblances before licensing a one-directional and defeasible transfer of the ruling. Formally, it is reconstructed as an Avicennan waṣfī modality whose descriptive condition is generated through the ordered assessment of candidate rootcases. The result is a disciplined, if merely epistemically "probable" (ẓannī), account of resemblance-based rule discovery.