«في الظاهر»
As it outwardly appears from the speaker's expression and relevant context.
The addressee cannot normally inspect the speaker's mind. If the speaker assigns an action to something and nothing indicates a different intention, the apparent predication is the working basis of interpretation.
When contextual evidence or the speaker's known standpoint indicates a nonliteral intention, the classification can change. The qualifier thus prevents us from pretending to know a speaker's inaccessible inner thoughts; it asks us to assess the publicly available signs of intended attribution.