Philosophy and scriptural interpretation › One truth and three methods of assent

Averroes holds that the law addresses people through different methods because their capacities for assent differ. To assent is to accept a proposition as true. His three principal methods are demonstration, dialectic, and rhetoric. The distinction concerns how acceptance is produced and justified within his account.

Demonstration aims at certainty through the appropriate premises and reasoning. Dialectic works with accepted opinions. Rhetoric persuades through forms of argument accessible to a wider audience. These descriptions concern methods; the treatise also associates them with differences among people. It would soften his position too much to treat the hierarchy as merely a preference among teaching styles.

The law's address to a whole community must accommodate those differences. An argument that convinces someone trained in demonstration might be inaccessible to another person. The absence of that training does not, for Averroes, exclude the person from religious life. The law contains ways of establishing assent appropriate to different capacities.

Section 12 states the principle that connects this account to interpretation: truth cannot oppose truth. Given the truth of the law and the truth established by an actual demonstration, their conclusions cannot genuinely contradict one another. The principle is conditional on the philosophical result actually being demonstrated. Confidence, fashion, and the prestige of a philosopher cannot substitute for that condition.

This is why attributing two incompatible truths to Averroes would misrepresent the argument here. He does not authorize someone to affirm a proposition as philosophically true and its denial as religiously true in the same respect. The problem is an apparent conflict between a demonstrated result and an apparent meaning. Interpretation is supposed to disclose their compatibility.