Place of Certainty in Five Arts in Farabi's View

Farabi attends to certainty in all the five-fold arts of logic in some way. Certainty is either essential or direct in an argument, while it is either accidental or indirect in other arts. In the art of dialectics, the well-known propositions for presenting dialectical affirmations are employed in order to attain certain knowledge. In the art of sermon, certainty is emphasized in the form of satisfactory affirmation in proportion to the addressee’s level of perception and as the framework of sermon-related activities and the criterion for quality control. In the art of poetry, imaginal matters are related to certainty in terms of concept and judgment. Fallacy is also related to certainty through using pseudo-propositions, such as pseudo-certainties in two positive and negative dimensions. Therefore, the place of certainty in each of the dialectical, rhetorical, poetic, and fallacious structures is of great significance, and one can observe an instrumental relationship between these four arts and the argument.