A Philosophical Deliberation of the Whatness and Howness of “Principles of Interpretation”

This research is an answer to a collection of external questions concerning the whatness and howness of principles of interpretation (qawā‘id al-tafsīr). As for the whatness discourser, after defining qawā‘id al-tafsīr as “a collection of the requisites of interpretation based on principles”, its subject, “the language of the Qur’an”, is touched upon and its relation to interpretation is viewed as “inferential”. Concerning the howness in terms of morphology and study of the anatomy, it has considered qawā‘id al-tafsīr as knowledge-bestowing grammatical rules and regarded the subject of the propositions as the lingual elements and their pretext as “necessity”. Then, by studying different types of these propositions, in constitution-study discourse, we have called the subject of these propositions as philosophical concepts and their pretext as nominal with an evolutionary origin. In the discourse on the criteria for possessing attribute of truthfulness (ittiṣāf bi al-ṣidq), after we considered the interpretation’s principle in its knowledge structure as conditional (rather than categorical), its truthfulness (ṣidq) is regarded as meaning conformity of the conditional relation to actual fact of principle; and by delineating three conditions expected from a proposition, its states of truthfulness and falsehood are stated.