Section
What is established is that judgments, statements, and beliefs, as explained above, are of two kinds: objective and practical—those that depend on the object of belief and those on which that object depends; those that derive from it and those that serve as its basis.
As for the first—the objective kind, which depends on and derives from the object of belief—it is unaffected by beliefs and does not vary as they vary. The realities of existing things are established in themselves, whether people believe in them or not, and whether their beliefs about them agree or differ. When people hold two contradictory positions concerning them, not everyone exercising independent judgment is correct in the sense that his statement corresponds to and agrees with its object. No rational person maintains this, as explained above.
Anyone who reports that a Muslim scholar—whether ʿUbayd Allah ibn al-Hasan al-ʿAnbarī or someone else—said that everyone exercising independent judgment in fundamental matters is correct, meaning that two contradictory statements are both true and correspond to reality, has attributed a false view to him on the basis of his own misconception. If he refutes and disproves this view, he does well to do so, even though no one actually holds the view being refuted.
However, disputes and disagreements of this kind fall into several categories: a dispute may concern wording alone, meaning alone, each of the two, or the two taken together.