Râzî went on to investigate inferences in both readings, and found the inferences from propositions with essentialist readings lined up closely with Avicenna's. The readings gave Râzî all the conversions mentioned in  section 2.3.1 above except 1 (he took the absolute affirmative to convert as a possibility proposition). He also accepted syllogisms with possibility propositions as minor premises to be productive. Interpretive considerations may have been at play in his clear preference for the essentialist reading, but what explicitly motivated the distinction is the need to have propositions refer to things which do not exist “externally”; the examples are always of non-instantiated geometric figures.