Losing Anchor: al-Samarqandī on Misconsidering Predication and Mistaking the Essential for the Accidental
Abstract
Aristotle’s fallacy of accident is notoriously hard to define, since its example sophisms seem to invite several different diagnoses. This paper brings Gazziero and Rahman’s analysis of the fallacy, in which predicates must remain anchored in the determinations that license them, to bear on al-Samarqandī’s (d. 722/1322) treatment of sūʾ iʿtibār al-ḥaml, the “misconsideration of predication”. The very denomination of this category, built on the Avicennian notion of iʿtibār (“consideration”), already ties predication to the determination under which a subject is taken, and so offers a promising point of contact with their analysis. After situating this category within al-Samarqandī’s twelve simple causes of error (asbāb al-ghalaṭ) and comparing that taxonomy with Aristotle’s, we show that his parallels to the fallacy of accident concern failures of grounding rather than ontological accident. Three illustrative sophisms exhibit three kinds of failure. The writer and finger movement shows a predicative failure, in which the determination constituting the causal subject is lost. The passenger in the moving ship shows a relational failure, in which the mediated provenance of a predicate is suppressed. The pre-eternity of existents shows a modal failure, in which the ground of a necessity is reassigned. In these cases bi-l-dhāt and bi-l-ʿaraḍ mark contrasts of ground rather than metaphysical classes of properties. We reconstruct the pre-eternity sophism and al-Samarqandī’s solution as a munāẓara. We then formalize all three sophisms in a single type-theoretical and dialogical notation that combines anchored presentations, Σ-types, the dhātī bearer function, a directed occurrence relation (Occ), and a notion of indispensability defined as failure of factorization.
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BibTeX
@misc{oruc2026losing,
title = {{Losing Anchor: al-Samarqandī on Misconsidering Predication and Mistaking the Essential for the Accidental}},
author = {Rahmi Oruç and Shahid Rahman and Walter Edward Young},
howpublished = {HAL},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
url = {https://shs.hal.science/halshs-05820911v2},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Losing Anchor: al-Samarqandī on Misconsidering Predication and Mistaking the Essential for the Accidental
AU - Rahmi Oruç
AU - Shahid Rahman
AU - Walter Edward Young
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/22
PB - HAL
UR - https://shs.hal.science/halshs-05820911v2
AB - Aristotle’s fallacy of accident is notoriously hard to define, since its example sophisms seem to invite several different diagnoses. This paper brings Gazziero and Rahman’s analysis of the fallacy, in which predicates must remain anchored in the determinations that license them, to bear on al-Samarqandī’s (d. 722/1322) treatment of sūʾ iʿtibār al-ḥaml, the “misconsideration of predication”. The very denomination of this category, built on the Avicennian notion of iʿtibār (“consideration”), already ties predication to the determination under which a subject is taken, and so offers a promising point of contact with their analysis. After situating this category within al-Samarqandī’s twelve simple causes of error (asbāb al-ghalaṭ) and comparing that taxonomy with Aristotle’s, we show that his parallels to the fallacy of accident concern failures of grounding rather than ontological accident. Three illustrative sophisms exhibit three kinds of failure. The writer and finger movement shows a predicative failure, in which the determination constituting the causal subject is lost. The passenger in the moving ship shows a relational failure, in which the mediated provenance of a predicate is suppressed. The pre-eternity of existents shows a modal failure, in which the ground of a necessity is reassigned. In these cases bi-l-dhāt and bi-l-ʿaraḍ mark contrasts of ground rather than metaphysical classes of properties. We reconstruct the pre-eternity sophism and al-Samarqandī’s solution as a munāẓara. We then formalize all three sophisms in a single type-theoretical and dialogical notation that combines anchored presentations, Σ-types, the dhātī bearer function, a directed occurrence relation (Occ), and a notion of indispensability defined as failure of factorization.
ER -