are themselves falsehood and misguidance—and who nevertheless wants them to be understood in a sense contrary to their conventional import and true reality—does greater harm to the addressee, and the tongue of a mute person is less damaging than his. Dispensing altogether with linguistic conventions is therefore more beneficial to people (1) than exposing them to interpretations that contradict their recognized meanings and realities. The same holds for every limb that was created for a specific benefit: if all that results from it is the very opposite of that benefit, its absence is better than its presence.

What makes this clear (2) is that when a speaker utters words whose reality and outward sense⦗16b⦘ admit of no other meaning, he certainly intends by them their actual meaning and what they explicitly denote and convey (3). Hence, if he later claims, “I intended by my words something other than their outward sense and what is naturally understood from them,” he is lying—either about having intended that other meaning, or about having sought clarity and comprehension (4). To construe his speech through a spurious interpretation is therefore, without fail, to charge him with falsehood in one of these two respects.

For this reason, false interpretation opens the gate to heresy and atheism, and provides the enemies of religion with a pathway to demolish it, the explanation of which will follow with the mention of (5):