Question

It is known that Sha'arei Yosher, Gate 3 chapter 22 (if I remember correctly), says that in the case of betrothal that is not fit for intercourse, this is not like every ordinary doubt, where there is a reality clearly known before Heaven and only because the reality is hidden from my eyes do I have external rules for how to conduct myself in cases of doubt. Rather, there is an actual applicability of doubt. But I did not understand the concept. A married woman is defined as: this woman is my wife. So how can there be doubt? Either she is my wife or she is not. And if you would say that the Rabbi follows his own approach, that a legal status is an essence and not an attribute, that still would not resolve it. For in the case of a divorced woman whom he divorced conditionally, there one can say that there are two complete legal statuses that exist in the woman (if I understood the concept fully): divorced woman and married woman. But when I come to betroth an unmarried woman, that does not exist, because being unmarried is not a legal status. And the proof is from the famous Kovetz He'arot, which explains one of the views that when there is a majority of permitted cases and a minority of prohibited cases, there is no nullification by majority, because permissibility is not a law; rather, anything in the world that does not have a prohibition-status upon it is permitted. And similarly here: an unmarried woman, so long as no legal status has been applied to her, is permitted (not in the sense that intercourse with her is permitted, but in the sense of personal-status law). Only a divorced woman is a married woman from whom the severance of divorce has detached her in an incomplete way, and that is an independent legal status.