Asking The Right Questions -- Note Two: Find reasons and clarify ambiguities

    Before we decide to accept a writer's or a speaker's argument, we must find the reasons that support their conclusion, and those ambiguous terms in the issues, conclusions or reasons must be clarified.
    What is the definition of reason? Reason(s) are the evidences that support the conculsion, and there may be more that one reason, we call them the reason set.
    After finding the issue and conlusion, proper reason(s) must also be found in the persuader's argument. If we cannot find reasons support for the conclusion, we'd better not to accept their conclusion.Even we have got some reasons, there still may be some ambiguous terms in the important three parts of an argument including issues, reasons and conclusions.
    So how can we deal with this situation?
    First, we should find out those important ambiguous terms which we will call them key terms here. They are the terms locate in the three important parts of an argument.
    Second, keep an eye out for abstract words or phrases.
    Third, use reverse role-playing to determine how someone might define certain words and phrases differently.
    Further more, the context is very important when we determining an ambiguous word or phrase. There are there context: the writers's or speaker's background, traditional uses of the term within the particular contrversy, and statements preceding and following the possible ambiguity.
    In a word, when we reasoning an argument, we must try get more detail information about the reasons, and we need to work hard to make clear the ambiguous words or phrases. We can check them in a dictionary, or meanings in specific criteria, the more specific, the better. Also we must know that some terms and phrases have both denotative and conotative meaning, the former one refers to the explicit descriptive meanings of the word and the latter one refers to the emotional associations that we have to the term or phrase.
    After doing all that, and still we can't determine the real meaning of the terms, it indicates that we have found a big ambiguity, and we won't accept the conclusion until the speaker or writer make them clear.