or four and even more. Hence the theorist who laid down this requirement made the two-word form the mandatory norm, excluding everything that exceeds or falls short of it. He further maintained that any surplus, if it occurs in the conclusion, turns it into several distinct conclusions; and if it occurs in the proof so that additional premises are introduced, he treats that as several separate syllogisms. This is sheer arbitrariness and no more cogent than saying the very opposite: that, by default, a conclusion should be single and its proof a single component; then, should the conclusion exceed that limit, it is counted as two, three, or four conclusions according to the excess, and the proof likewise as two, three, or four proofs according to what it indicates. If one insists on such talk, this alternative is in fact preferable to their view, for the word “proof” (dalīl) is singular and its meaning should therefore be singular. Qiyās itself is the proof, and the term qiyās implies measurement, as when one says, “I measured this against that.” A measurement can be made with one element just as with two or three; its basic form is a single measurement. If one measures with two or three, that produces two or three measurements, not one; consequently those acts of measurement are multiple qiyās, not one qiyās.

Thus their ruling that anything beyond two premises amounts to several syllogisms, and anything short of two is only half a syllogism and not a complete one, is nothing but convention without any intelligible foundation—no different from their arbitrary distinction between essential attributes and accidental attributes that are inseparable from the quiddity and from existence.

A terminological dispute over the labels “cause” and “proof”:

Accordingly, it becomes clear that these people, in what they call a “definition” and a “demonstration,” appeal neither to an existing reality nor to a rational principle but only to bare convention—just like the debate over the term ʿillah (efficient cause): is it a name for something that invariably necessitates its effect so that it admits neither contradiction nor exception, or is it a name for something that merely tends to produce the effect, which may nevertheless fail to occur because a condition is absent or a hindrance is present? The same applies to the convention adopted by some theoreticians and disputants: one of them calls “proof” whatever inevitably entails the conclusion in an absolute sense—thereby including the absence of a counter-argument—whereas another reserves the term “proof” for whatever is by nature supposed to entail the conclusion, though its entailment may fail for lack of a condition or the presence of an impediment. Likewise, the dialecticians disagree over whether the one adducing evidence is obliged, when stating his proof, to address