Rahmi Oruc

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.

Islamic dialogue theory, developed through the _Munāẓara_ tradition, introduces a distinct model of argumentation and a unique type of dialogue not yet captured by existing typologies. While pragma-dialectics upholds a single, idealized normative framework, and dialogue theory distributes norms across multiple types, Stevens (2026) argues that both neglect the ethical responsibilities built into argumentative practice. Building on her account, I show that in _munāẓara_, argumentative roles are procedurally indeterminate and inherently negotiable. Decisions about sequencing, burden of proof, what counts as a move, and how one flavors a role involve a continuous negotiation of the rights and obligations of each party.

In this paper we draw on the munāẓara tradition to intervene in the debate on whether argument assessment should be agent- or act-based. We introduce and deploy the notion of sequencing – the ordering of the antagonist’s critical moves – to make explicit an ambiguity between the agent and the act of arguing. We show that sequencing is a component of argumentation that inextricably involves the procedure as well as the agent and, therefore, its assessment cannot be adequately undertaken if either agent- or act-based norms are ignored or demoted. We present our intervention through a challenge that virtue argumentation needs to address for it to be considered an alternative to existing theories of argument assessment (Section 2). We then briefly introduce munāẓara and focus on its notion of sequencing to explicate the interdependence between the agent and the procedure (Section 3). Next, we address the challenge by offering an account of the virtuous arguer as a virtuous sequencer (Section 4). In conclusion, we reflect on the implications of sequencing on virtue argumentation and the norms of argumentation.

The aim of this paper is to highlight an interdependence between procedural and agential norms that undermines their neat separation when appraising argumentation. Drawing on the munāẓara tradition, we carve a space for sequencing in argumentation scholarship. Focusing on the antagonist’s sequencing of critical moves, we identify each sequence’s corresponding values of argumentation: coalescence, reliability, and efficacy. These values arise through the mediation of virtues and simultaneously underpin procedural as well as agential norms. Consequently, an ambiguity between procedure and agent becomes apparent. This ambiguity hints at the potential for a virtue theory of argumentation that draws on procedural norms.