What does it mean: I - the important but easy examples

A couple of times this term, we have seen that it's often necessary to stop and clarify, and agree on, what a term means before it is possible to answer a question. We had a good example this morning of what that can entail:

• Milk gave us a definition of the term adverbial conjunction as "a conjunction which joins two clauses". This was a good start, but it also had a serious weakness: it did not allow us to distinguish the different types of conjunction. 
• Correcting this weakness both gave us a more useful definition, and also showed us how we might go about building on an idea that stated something right, but wasn't the best idea. And that process helped us all to gain a clearer and more complete understanding of adverbial conjunctions by looking at their functions, both what they do do and what they don't do. 

Another recent example was when we discussing the comprehension check question on "The Sound of the Shell", and there was some confusion in the discussion about which "boys [knew] each other before" (class handout, March 2011). The confusion in our discussion was caused by the fact that people had different ideas about what the question meant, and the only way to come to an answer that we could all accept was to discuss the meaning of the term "know each other before". Once that definition was settled, the facts in the novel could be applied to the agreed definition of the term to answer the question. And as happened this morning, the discussion about what the term know each other before meant required us to address an opposing idea that was believed to be wrong, and giving reasons to persuade some people to change their minds.

These examples might seem relatively straight forward, and they were. They also had the advantage of not being too controversial, of having what we might call one "correct" answer. The example that Nid kindly suggested this morning more effectively made the point that defining terms is often crucial because her example involves real life issues where something that matters very much to some of us hinges on the definition of what a term means. And since Nid's excellent example is so complex, and significantly different to the easy examples that can be solved by checking a dictionary reference work, I'll write a  new post to present that topic for discussion.