but each may have mingled truth with what does not belong to it in what they deny or affirm, because meanings are confused and words have multiple meanings. Thus, what one denies is what the other affirms. Were this confusion and ambiguity removed, the contradictory disagreement would disappear. People’s disagreements concerning compulsion and divine decree, the denial and affirmation of corporeality, and the denial and affirmation of what transmitted reports entail fall into this category.

All this is found in the books of speculative theologians, scholars of hadith and jurisprudence, and others.

The assertion that necessary knowledge must be shared by all rational people is mistaken. Rather, necessary knowledge, like inferential knowledge, is sometimes shared by them and sometimes confined to those endowed with the capacity to apprehend it.

Likewise, the assertion that a group whose numbers reach the threshold for mass transmission cannot agree to deny necessary knowledge is incorrect. They may indeed agree to do so if they collude. A mass-transmitted report arising from collusion does not yield knowledge; it yields knowledge only because collusion is absent. Accordingly, one of those who disagree may have exercised his judgment and reached the correct conclusion, while the other exercised his judgment and erred. The first then receives two rewards and the second one reward, while his error is forgiven—forgiven him. Both may also have exercised their judgment and erred, in which case both are forgiven and receive a reward.

The correct position may lie in what we put forward as a third view—either by drawing distinctions within what they stated without qualification