In the stimulus, Ashley says that words like "of" and "upon" do not refer to anything, unlike words such as "pencil" and "shirt."
Josh responds by saying he agrees, and since such words are meaningless, they should be abandoned.
Wait a second. Ashley just said that those words do not refer to anything. Josh is making a jump...do you see what it is? He is presuming that any word that doesn't refer to anything is meaningless.
/Refer - ->/Meaning
The contrapositive of this is
Meaning - ->Refer
The question says, "Joshua's remarks indicate that he interpreted Ashley's statement to imply that..."
Given our analysis above, we know that Josh took Ashley's remarks and interpreted them to mean that if a word doesn't refer to anything, it's meaningless. We're looking for an answer that captures this.
Answer A says only words that refer to something have meaning. The word "only" introduces necessary conditions, so this translates to Meaning - ->Refer. This is the contrapositive of the /Refer - ->/Meaning we diagrammed above when we caught how Joshua was misinterpreting Ashley's remarks. This is the correct answer.
Answer C says words that refer to something are meaningful. This translates to
Refer - ->Meaning
This has the right concepts, but it is backward, as we need it to say
Meaning - ->Refer, as we see in Answer A. For this reason, Answer C is incorrect, as it confuses the sufficient and necessary conditions for each other.
Does this make sense? Let us know if you have any more questions!
