its indication of the intended meaning and its indication of an unintended meaning—not that this absence itself constitutes confusion. It has also been said—or he himself said elsewhere—that this is called “ambiguous” either because, in the mind of someone who does not know, negation resembles affirmation, or because whatever involves resemblance becomes unknown. Thus, the term “resemblance” is applied to what is unknown, naming the effect after its cause.

The reply is that negation is confused with affirmation only because the evidence for one resembles the evidence for the other. When evidence for both is absent, doubt arises in the mind. Confusion is more specific than doubt: a person may doubt without having confused one thing with another. Confusion occurs only when there is a resemblance between the two. Likewise, not every lack of knowledge is a matter of confusing similar things. Someone who has neither conceived of a question nor become acquainted with it is ignorant of it; one does not say that he has confused it with something else. Someone who has not heard a statement does not know what the speaker intended or what the statement signifies; yet one does not say that he has confused it with something else.

Confusion is more specific: it occurs only when there is a shared feature that gives rise to it, as when someone sees something in the distance and cannot tell whether it is an animal or something else, or sees something in the sky and cannot tell whether it is the crescent moon or something else, and similar cases. And Allah Most High knows best.