کتایون مهرابادی

In the Persian language and literature, the literary works of the fifth Hijri century are of great importance for numerous reasons. This period is considered one of the most important stages of the perfection and expansion of Persian prose; a period when post-Islamic Persian prose has moved beyond its early stages and is rapidly progressing towards greater maturity and complexity. The works of this era are worthy of extensive research and evaluation. A large family of these works consists of kalam and mystical texts. Such texts, to varying degrees, contain arguments and rational discourses and are, in terms of the credibility of their arguments, worthy, even necessary, of evaluation.

On the other hand, the credibility of any argument depends on its adherence to logical rules. Some arguments, on the surface, appear to follow logical rules and have an appearance of syllogism; but inwardly, they contain certain types of logical fallacies and are, in fact, pseudo-proof, not true syllogisms.

Therefore, the logical validation of such works, on one hand, requires mastery of the old literary language and familiarity with the words and specialized terms in the aforementioned fields of the ancient Persian language period; and on the other hand, requires knowledge of the science of logic. As a result, such an objective becomes an interdisciplinary research that connects two disciplines: Persian language and literature and the science of logic; generally, and mathematical logic; specifically. This treatise is an effort in this field.

In this treatise, the arguments from two books, Kashaf al-Mahjub by Ali bin Othman Hojwiri and Zad al-Mosaferin by Nasir Khosrow Qubadiayi Balkhi, have been analyzed, formalized, and validated. The tools and criteria for this examination were mathematical logic for syntax or argument structure and Avicennism logic for deriving meaning or content. The logical languages used for examining the syntax of premises were propositional logic and first-order logic (singular and multi-sorted), and the semantic ranking criteria of propositions were based on Ibn Sina's inferential materials from Esharat va Tanbihat.

The findings of the treatise were that the arguments in the book Kashaf al-Mahjub were often valid and sound from a syntactic perspective, but from a semantic standpoint, they contained presumptive and doctrinal claims, and sometimes fallacies in the understanding of terms or statements were observed. In some of the arguments in the book Zad al-Mosaferin, logical errors were identified from a syntactic perspective. From a semantic perspective as well, a significant portion of the premises of the arguments was found to be based on specious reasoning and sophisms, which reduces the argument to a pseudo-proof.

those of Naser Khosrow, rely on fundamental religious assumptions and belief