He said:

“The answer is that the claim to self-evident knowledge has already been disproved, and the third possibility remains. This premise therefore involves circular reasoning, since establishing it depends on negating it.”

[Response to al-Rāzī’s statement]

The objection to this is as follows:

A claim to self-evident knowledge can be invalidated only by showing that the claimant is lying or mistaken. Yet those making this claim are numerous, widely dispersed peoples who are known not to have colluded in a lie. Impugning their claim is therefore like impugning other mass-transmitted reports. It is consequently impermissible to say that they lied when reporting the self-evident knowledge they themselves possess.

Moreover, the disputant concedes that this conviction is firmly rooted in everyone’s natural disposition and self-evident intuitions, and that they are compelled to acknowledge it. They can no more rid themselves of it than they can rid themselves of comparable necessary convictions. They merely say that this necessary conviction is mistaken and is a judgment of wahm (estimation).

The invalidity of this has already been explained: this is a universal rational proposition, not a report concerning a particular instance. Even if it were such a report, certainty about it would be like certainty about anything else perceived through the inward or outward senses. It thus falls within either universal rational propositions or particular objects of perception. And just as it is impossible for numerous groups that have not colluded to agree on a false claim in a case like