Refutation of the logicians’ prohibition against citing mass-transmitted reports, empirical observations, and intuitions as evidence:

Some logicians have claimed that propositions known through tawātur, experience, or intuition are confined to the individual who attained them by that route and therefore cannot serve as proof against anyone else. By contrast, they argue, other kinds of propositions are shared and may be advanced in debate. We have shown elsewhere that this is a faulty distinction.

For sensory perceptions—whether external or internal—divide into private and public. What Zayd alone has seen, smelled, tasted, or touched is not necessarily shared by others, nor is what he has felt within himself of hunger, thirst, pain, or pleasure. Yet certain sense-data are common to people at large: all behold the sun, the moon, and the stars, and, more narrowly, the residents of a given town jointly perceive their local mountain, central mosque, river, and the like, whether created or man-made.

In the same way, matters known by mass transmission and repeated experience may be common to the generality of humankind. People concur in the existence of Mecca and other famous lands; they agree that the sea exists, though most have never seen it; and they acknowledge the historical reality of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, peace be upon them, and their claim to prophethood. Reports about these figures have reached virtually all human beings; those who have not heard of them dwell at the margins of the inhabited world, not its center.

Experiential knowledge arises through sense perception allied with reason:

Ordinary people have repeatedly observed that drinking water quenches thirst, that severing the neck causes death, and that a severe blow produces pain. The knowledge of these universal propositions is experiential, for the senses detect only a particular instance of satiation, the death of a specific individual, or the pain of a given person, whereas the judgment that everyone who undergoes the same action will experience the same result is inferred from accumulated experience.