When a question stem doesn’t fit cleanly into any of the categories you’ve come to recognize, it’s especially important to read it closely to make sure you’re clear on its exact meaning. This stem tells us:

1. We can expect two viewpoints in the stimulus – Ashley and Joshua – and Joshua will respond to Ashley.
2. Joshua’s response will assume Ashley meant something she didn’t say explicitly.
3. The correct answer will express the version of Ashley’s statement that exists in Joshua’s head.

So we should read Ashley’s statements without skepticism, just absorbing the information, and we should read Joshua’s response combing for gaps between his statements and Ashley’s.

We can isolate the gap between Ashley’s statement and Joshua’s understanding by looking at where Joshua thinks they agree. Ashley provides the claim “[various words] don’t refer to anything,” and our boy Josh says “yep I agree; they’re meaningless.”

Those concepts might seem related, but they’re slightly different, and that jump from not referring to anything to being meaningless is the implication we’re looking for in the answers. Josh assumes Ashley is implying that:

English: If a word doesn’t refer to anything, it’s meaningless.
Logic: /Refer To Something → /Meaning