The examination of epistemological disagreement of Usulis and Akhbaris on Essential validity of certainty (qat’)

The epistemology of Principles of Islamic jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh) expressed in Descriptive and normative domains. The descriptive approach discusses about “is” problems and includes Usuli’s and Akhbari’s jurisprudence that will be discussed in this article. The normative approach talks about “oughts” and the nature of jurisprudencial knowledge, its sources and its possibility. The normative approach could be examined in other articles. Here, Alongside with revealing the position of Principles of Islamic jurisprudence in jurisprudential derivations (istinbat fiqhi), we tried to mention the centrality of essential validity of certainty as a common epistemic element in all of jurisprudential arguments.  To do so, first of all, the origin of this issue, the reason of its posing, and various bases adopted by Usulis about essential validity of certainty will be considered and afterwards, according to precise intellectual and epistemic Considerations of Usulis for proving the essential validity of certainty, their epistemic presuppositions will be determined and eventually, the epistemic disagreement of Akhbaris vs. Usulis (realism) will be introduced and the disefficient confrontation of Usulis with Akhbaris (subjectivism) will be assessed. According to our findings, still the more effective explanation of validity’s structure in usul al-fiqh could be given as an alternative theory of essential validity of certainty and it could be taken as a reply to Akhbarism.