the other, but not conversely. If the entailment arises from the essence, the inference concerns the essence; if it concerns an attribute or a ruling, the inference concerns that attribute or ruling. The defects in their restrictive classification have thus become clear.

As for their division into three types, all of them reduce to what has been stated about evidence necessarily entailing what it establishes. What they describe as a “conjunctive syllogism” can be cast in the form of an “exceptive syllogism”; likewise, an “exceptive syllogism” can be cast in the form of a “conjunctive syllogism.” The matter therefore comes down to a single consideration: the material content of the argument. This content is not learned from the syllogistic form they describe. Rather, whoever understands the content sufficiently to know that this necessarily entails that understands the inference, whether or not it is cast in syllogistic form, and whether it is expressed in their terminology or otherwise. Indeed, the expressions refined by Muslim minds and tongues are far, far better than theirs.

The “conjunctive syllogism” reduces entirely to one necessary entailment followed by another, as explained. This is precisely what the “exceptive syllogism,” constructed from implicative and disjunctive conditionals, amounts to. An implicative conditional is an inference through necessary entailment: from affirming the entailing proposition—the antecedent, or condition—to affirming the entailed proposition—the consequent, or result; or from negating the entailed proposition—the consequent, or result—to negating the entailing proposition—the antecedent, or condition.

As for the “disjunctive conditional,” which scholars of legal theory call “testing